102 THE WILD-FLOWERS OF SELBORNE 



the origin of the garden pinks. The beautiful little 

 ivy-leaved toad-flax, now happily so abundant on 

 walls throughout the country, was only known to 

 Gerarde as a garden plant, and is supposed to have 

 been introduced from Italy. Among other waifs and 

 strays from cultivation must doubtless be reckoned 

 the yellow corydalis, the purple snapdragon, the 

 houseleek, often to be seen on the roofs of cottages, 

 and several kinds of sedum or stonecrop. One very 

 rare member of a most plain and uninteresting family, 

 Senecio squalidus, now to be found growing on vener- 

 able walls at Oxford, is said to have originally escaped 

 from the botanical garden. 



Weeds have been well called "the tramps of the 

 vegetable world " ; and it is most curious how some 

 plants seem to accompany man in his movements 

 across the globe. The common ribwort plantain is 

 known among the North American Indians as the 

 "white man's foot/' because they say it always springs 

 up in places where the colonists have encamped. Sir 

 Joseph Hooker tells us that " on one occasion, landing 

 on a small uninhabited island, nearly at the Antipodes, 

 the first evidence he met with of its having been 

 previously visited by man was the English chickweed ; 

 and this he traced to a mound that marked the grave 

 of a British sailor, and that was covered with the 

 plant, doubtless the offspring of seed that had adhered 

 to the spade or mattock with which the grave had 

 been dug." It is well known that numbers of our 

 English wild-flowers are to be found in luxuriant 

 abundance in parts of America. The viper's bugloss 

 has become a troublesome weed in Virginia; the 

 fields along the course of the Hudson river are in 

 some places overrun with the bladder campion, in 



