AGENCY OF MAN. 91 



plants of Algiers and Tunis. With the wools and cottons of 

 the East, or of Barbary, there are often brought into France 

 the grains of exotic plants, some of which naturalise them- 

 selves. Of this I will cite a striking example. There is, at the 

 gate of Montpellier, a meadow set apart for drying foreign 

 wool after it has been washed. There hardly passes a year 

 without foreign plants .being found naturalised in this drying- 

 ground. I have gathered there Centaurea parviftora, Psoralea 

 palcestina, and Hypericum crispum.' This fact is not only 

 illustrative of the aid which man lends inadvertently to the 

 propagation of plants, but it also demonstrates the multiplicity 

 of seeds which are borne about in the woolly and hairy coats 

 of wild animals. Many plants have been naturalised in our 

 sea-ports by the ballast of ships, and others have spread through 

 Europe from botanical gardens, so as to have become more com- 

 mon than many indigenous species. In the seventeenth century 

 a ship from Japan was wrecked near Guernsey, and to this mis- 

 fortune the beautiful Amaryllis owes its origin, which now serves 

 to decorate the island. 



It is scarcely two centuries since the Canadian Erigeron, or 

 flea-bane, was brought from America to the Botanical Garden at 

 Paris, and already the seeds have been carried by the winds over 

 France, the British Islands, Italy, Sicily, Holland, and Grer- 

 many. 



The cereals, which we originally received from the distant East, 

 have followed our colonists to America and Australia, but along 

 with them the blue corn-flowers and scarlet poppies, the orna- 

 ments of our fields, have wandered to the prairies of Illinois, or 

 to the plains of Victoria, where their well-known sight awakens 

 many a fond recollection of former days in the heart of the emi- 

 grant. The plantain, or rib-wort, so common in our fields and 

 meadows, follows everywhere the 'pale-faces' into the backwoods 

 of America. Where the Indian sees this plant, he knows that 

 he has not long to tarry in the land of his fathers, for the 

 despoiling stranger is at hand. 



Soon after the arrival of the Spaniards in Buenos Ayres, the 

 thistle invaded the Pampas, as the immense grass-plains of 

 that level country are called, and in course of time has covered 

 many square miles with its prickly vegetation. In this con- 

 genial soil its growth is so luxurious as frequently to overtop 



