196 PEPACTON 



plow are always infested with "blind nettles,'*' oth- 

 ers with wild buckwheat, black bindweed, or cockle. 

 The seed lies dormant under the sward, the warmth 

 and the moisture affect it not until other conditions 

 are fulfilled. 



The way in which one plant thus keeps another 

 down is a great mystery. Germs lie there in the 

 soil and resist the stimulating effect of the sun and 

 the rains for years, and show no sign. Presently 

 something whispers to them, "Arise, your chance 

 has come ; the coast is clear ; " and they are up and 

 doing in a twinkling. 



Weeds are great travelers; they are, indeed, the 

 tramps of the vegetable world. They are going 

 east, west, north, south; they walk; they fly; they 

 swim; they steal a ride; they travel by rail, by 

 flood, by wind; they go under ground, and they 

 go above, across lots, and by the highway. But, 

 like other tramps, they find it safest by the high- 

 way: in the fields they are intercepted and cut off; 

 but on the public road, every boy, every passing 

 herd of sheep or cows, gives them a lift. Hence 

 the incursion of a new weed is generally first 

 noticed along the highway or the railroad. In 

 Orange County I saw from the car window a field 

 overrun with what I took to be the branching white 

 mullein. Gray says it is found in Pennsylvania 

 and at the head of Oneida Lake. Doubtless it had 

 come by rail from one place or the other. Our 

 botanist says of the bladder campion, a species of 

 pink, that it has been naturalized around Boston; 



