24 Minnesota Plant Life. 



times who should be reincarnated in a modern society and 

 should insist upon wearing the coat of mail and carrying the 

 rapier which were necessary in another age, but would be rec- 

 ognized as altogether out of place in the life of the present day. 



The pine trees, with their needle-shaped leaves fitted to trans- 

 pire water but slowly and with their strong branches able to 

 carry the weight of the snow which is piled upon them in their 

 northern home, when they find their way down the river to the 

 comparatively genial climate of Iowa cannot at once abandon 

 the structures which they developed under the stern necessity 

 imposed by the severer climate of their native land. The mat- 

 plant, such as a purslane or carpet-weed, adapted to life on a 

 flat plane where it is not shaded by surrounding plants but 

 spreads out all its prostrate branches in a discoid body, cannot 

 erect itself into the slender wand of the aster, taught to assume 

 this shape by centuries of existence in the underbrush above 

 which it had to lift its leaves that they might catch the sun. 

 The aspiring spruce telling in its form a story of other spruce 

 trees close beside it crowding each other as they all reached 

 upward for the light, if it is planted in one's dooryard with noth- 

 ing near to shade it cannot abandon the character which it 

 developed of old. Plants when they migrate from place to 

 place must take with them those structures and habits which 

 are fitted best to the whole history of their species. In their 

 migrations they select places which resemble as closely as pos- 

 sible those to which they are accustomed. They allow them- 

 selves a certain freedom just as men do, but even as regards men 

 it is well-known that they prefer to migrate along the same 

 parallel of latitude, so that the inhabitants of Minnesota have 

 come rather from the forests of New England and New York, 

 from Canada, from Scotland, and from Scandinavia, than from 

 the highlands of Mexico, from Italy, Africa, or Brazil. 



Struggles of migrating plants. It must be apparent from 

 all that has been said that the laws governing the migration of 

 plants are substantially the same as those that govern the migra- 

 tion of other living beings. It is an instinct with all living 

 creatures to maintain their own existence as long as they can 

 and to do this they wrest from others, weaker or less fortunate, 

 the right to food and sunshine which they in their turn demand 





