74 FAMILIAR TREES 



poets, tell in favour of personal knowledge on the 

 part of the writer. 



After centuries of cultivation, it is extremely dif- 

 ficult to speak with any confidence as to the truly 

 indigenous character of any plant from its present 

 mode of occurrence. Buildings and gardens may have 

 existed on spots where their former presence would 

 not now be suspected : the non-human methods of 

 seed-dispersal, the wind, the fleeces in which burrs 

 become entangled, squirrels, dormice, and fruit-eating 

 birds, have been in operation year by year, until we 

 may almost imagine the seed of every species in the 

 country to have had an opportunity of sprouting on 

 every inch of our land. Woods, too, have been so 

 artificialised by felling, clearing, and replanting, that 

 we can hardly consider any of them much more truly 

 primeval than our hedgerows ; and plants once culti- 

 vated may have had time in the lapse of centuries 

 even to degenerate to a more primitive wild type. If, 

 however, we find a species, which is not likely ever to 

 have been planted in woodlands, uniformly distributed 

 over- a wide area, growing in the heart of forests and 

 woods of mixed species, and always presenting marked 

 characteristics unlike its cultivated representative, there 

 is some considerable a 'priori probability of its being 

 wild. Judged by this test, we have little hesitation in 

 considering the Medlar indigenous in northern France ; 

 but we are far less confident as to its having any claim 

 to be so classed on this side of the Channel, unless, per- 

 haps, in the extreme south of our island. 



The name Mespilus, or rather its Greek original 

 Mespilon, dates from Theophrastus, and it seems to 



