22 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



distance from the shore, and I remember a dense patcli a few 

 miles north of us, twenty-five miles inland, from which tho 

 fruit was annually carried to market. How much further 

 inland they grow, I know not. Dr. Cliarles T. Jackson speaks 

 of finding " beach-plums " (perhaps they were this kind) more 

 than one hundred miles inland in Maine. 



It chances that similar objections lie against all the more 

 notorious instances of the kind on record. 



Yet I am prepared to believe that some seeds, especially 

 small ones, may retain their vitality for centuries under favora- 

 ble circumstances. In the spring of 1859, the old Hunt house, 

 so called, in this town, whose chimney bore the date of 1703, 

 was taken down. This stood on land which belonged to John 

 Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, and a part of 

 the house was evidently much older than the above date, and 

 belonged to the Winthrop family. For many years, I have 

 ransacked this neighborhood for plants, and I consider myself 

 familiar with its productions. Thinking of the seeds which 

 are said to be sometimes dug up at an unusual depth in the 

 earth, and thus to reproduce long extinct plants, it occurred 

 to me last fall that some new or rare plants might have sprung 

 up in the cellar of this house, which had been covered from the 

 light so long. Searching there on the 22d of September, I 

 found, among other rank weeds, a species of nettle (Urtica 

 urens) which I had not found before ; dill, which I had not 

 seen growing spontaneously ; the Jerusalem oak, (Chenopodium 

 botrys) which I had seen wild in but one place ; black night- 

 shade (Solanum nigrum,) which is quite rare hereabouts, and 

 common tobacco, which, though it was often cultivated here in 

 the last century, has for fifty years been an unknown plant in 

 this town, and a few months before this not even I had heard 

 that one man in the north part of the town was cultivating a 

 few plants for his own use. I have no doubt that some or all 

 of these plants sprang from seeds which had long been buried 

 under or about that house, and that that tobacco is an ad- 

 ditional evidence that tlie plant was formerly cultivated here. 

 The cellar has been filled up this year, and four of those 

 plants, including the tobacco, are now again extinct in that 

 locality. 



