12 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTUKAL SOCIETY. 



comes, however, these sturdy plants of the burned land are 

 quickly disposed of and rarely if ever do they make themselves 

 troublesome in the cultivated field. 



Were this routine from the primeval forest, through the clear- 

 ing stage to the ciiltivated crop, still as simple as when Champlain 

 observed the cultivation by the Indians of corn and beans and 

 squashes, we should have few weeds and I should ha^e no occa- 

 sion to talk to jou today. But the progress of civilization is 

 accompanied b}^ many drawbacks, among them the introduced 

 weeds. 



The original wliite settlers of New England brought with 

 them many garden seeds, and not unnaturally they introduced 

 with the good seeds many that were bad. So we find, according 

 to John Josselyn in 1672, that no less than 40 species of Eu- 

 ropean weeds had "sprung up since the English planted and 

 kept cattle in Xew England." The naturalization of these 

 European plants led Josselyn with unconcealed seventeenth- 

 century credulity to ask: "What became of the influence of 

 those planets that produce and govern these plants before this 

 time?" Without awaiting any umisual planetary changes, how- 

 ever, the introduced plants mentioned by Josselyn made them- 

 selves entirely at home, and to this day these first emigrants 

 from the European roadsides ^ shepherd's purse, dandelion, sow- 

 thistle, stinging nettle, mallow, plantain, chickweed, clotbur (bur- 

 dock), mullein, sorrel, smartweed, St. John's-wort, yarrow, 

 toad-flax (l)utter-and-eggs), pui'slane, etc. — are among the most 

 persistent followers of American civilization. 



The next reliable records of weeds introduced into New Eng- 

 land are those of Manasseh Cutler, who, in 1783, reported 66 

 species, among them the buttercup, "common in moist pastures 

 and fields," white-weed or daisy, "A'ery injurious to grass lands," 

 and chicory, "fields in Cambridge." Since then the buttercup and 

 the daisy have followed the M'hite man across the Kockj" Moun- 

 tains and are already common on the Pacific slope, and chicory 

 has spread over the Eastern States, with forerunners appearing 

 throughout the West. In Bigelow's Florula Bostoniensis (1814), 

 83 introduced species are enumerated, and in the edition of 1840, 

 140 species. Gradually this list has increased until we are now 



