64 POPULAR GEOGRAPHY OF PLANTS. 



do they stand like little trees around the humble earth- 

 hovels of the country-people ; on favourable soil they often 

 form extensive bush, even overtopping the horseman, who 

 is as helpless in it as in a wood, since they intercept the 

 sight and yet afford no trunk which might be climbed." 

 One of them, which the Russians call the "Leap in the 

 Eield," and to which Germans have given the more poetical 

 name of the " Wind Witch," possesses characters of a most 

 remarkable kind, which cannot be better described than in 

 the words of Professor Schleiden, from whom many of the 

 foregoing facts have also been collected. 



" A poor Thistle-plant, it divides its strength in the for- 

 mation of numerous dry, slender shoots, which spread out 

 on all sides and are entangled with one another. More 

 bitter than Wormwood, the cattle will not touch it, even 

 in times of the most severe famine. The domes which it 

 forms upon the turf are often three feet high and some- 

 times from ten to fifteen in circumference, arched over with 

 naked, delicate, thin branches. In the autumn, the stem of 

 the plant rots off, and the globe of branches dries up into 

 a ball, light as a feather, which is then driven through the 

 air, by the autumnal winds, over the steppe. 



" Numbers of such balls often fly at once over the plain, 



