STOWAWAYS 257 



sack may only become finally useless in the far north of the North Island, 

 having spread blights and noxious weeds from one end of the colony to 

 the other. It may commence its career with all sorts of high ideals, with 

 the determination to carry only Timaru wheat, Hawke's Bay ryegrass, 

 and Akaroa cock's-foot, but has in later life to abate the lofty pretensions 

 of youth and ultimately to submit to the carriage of ordinary grain, 

 ordinary ryegrass, and ordinary cock's-foot. Later, still whole and pre- 

 sentable, our bag will be considered fit for tailings and oaten chaff. It 

 will now perhaps cross Cook's Strait and be passed about a farming 

 district bearing perhaps in one short jolt apples, in another onions, 

 becoming at each trip more stained with rain and marked with mud. It 

 is now filled with potatoes another downward stage and forwarded to 

 Auckland. By this time ragged, rent, disreputable, with senses blunted 

 in regard to weed-carriage, it may reach some 

 struggling settler's little home in the roadless 

 north ; there, with no pride left, it will cover a 

 bee-hive, roof a leaky hen-coop, or in a buggy 

 act as mat for dirty boots. Lastly, the poor 

 creature takes to drink, and hangs in a besotted 

 state about a native settlement. There, utterly 

 degraded, it may serve as a saddle-cloth to some 

 galled Maori hack, and ultimately dropped, 

 hatch out some long-secreted weed, that like a 

 wicked action comes to light at last. It is not 

 very often that a stowaway is thus caught red- 

 handed emerging from his hiding-place ; yet 

 white goose-foot (Chenopodium album) was 



. , f Iv White Goose-foot. 



seized by me m the very act, a magnificent 



specimen, his great roots embedded in a rotten sack, one of many strewn 

 about the site of a Maori drainer's camp. 1 



Evening primrose ((Enothera odorata) has always been a fairly 

 common plant between Napier and Petane, and between Petane and the 

 coastal hills ; yet this Patagonian would, I believe, never have made un- 

 assisted the inland journey necessary to reach Tutira. It appeared about 

 a plough camp, a plant here and a plant there, on the site of the tents 



1 Dr H. A. Gleason, of New York Botanical Gardens, Bronx Park, tells me that the seed of 

 Chenopodium album has been found in the dwellings of prehistoric man in Europe. Then, 

 apparently, as now, the plant was parasitic to man, since it only grows on tilled lands, surely 

 an extraordinarily interesting glimpse into the long life-history of a weed. 



H 



