BURDENS OF SIN 



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to have been willingly touched by stock. During winter, however, 

 when the vast foliage fails, it is not improbable that seeds may have 

 been picked up by rooting wild pig and thus carried from spot to spot. 

 The plant has a remarkable local history. It grew on Tutira in a 

 locality where we had occasion to erect sheep- 

 yards. These were not only used many times 

 every season for drafting, docking, &c., but 

 were built, besides, on a flat-topped ridge 

 over which one shepherd or another rode 

 weekly, or oftener. 



Lastly, there was a spring in the immediate 

 neighbourhood convenient at noon for boiling 

 the billy which shepherds carry slung on their 

 saddles. Traffic, in fact, on that ridge was 

 continuous from one year's end to another. 

 The original forty or fifty specimens of milk- 

 thistle were spaded out cut below the crown 

 by myself ; undoubtedly not a single plant was 

 missed, for, apart from the fact that I would 

 be careful in my own interest, the weed had 

 elected to settle on a fertile sheep-camp, where the grass was closely 

 nibbled, and where, because of the fertility of the soil, any specimen 

 missed would have become in summer-time a plant five or six feet 

 high, peculiarly apparent and conspicuous. Seedlings, nevertheless, 

 appeared for twenty-five years on an area 30 feet by 60 feet one 

 season a rather less, another, a rather more, numerous germination 

 taking place. Evidently the seeds possessed, like the units of egg- 

 batches of certain moths, the property of hatching out at widely 

 different intervals of time, thus ensuring a propitious period sooner 

 or later. 1 



The daisy (Bellis perennis) merits mention not only on account of 

 its manner of arrival, but because the plant has proved quite exceptional 

 in its rate of spread. Unlike the majority of aliens, it has increased 

 slowly, even on soils afterwards found to be entirely suitable. Locally 



1 It came during the great war, whilst the station was depleted of its men ; specimens 

 then not only seeded on the original site, but spread elsewhere ; I notice the alien greenfinch 

 seems now to be feeding on the seeds. 



Milk Thistle. 



