THISTLEDOWN BLOWS. 151 



we are obliged artificially to fence in and protect with 

 all possible precautions. But even so, in spite of all our 

 endeavours to expel nature with our civilised pitchfork, 

 ' tamen usque recurrit.' 



The thistle that is overrunning the Home Close 

 ranks, indeed, among the best adapted and most suc- 

 cessful of its kind : which is only the converse way of 

 saying that it is a most troublesome and ineradicable 

 weed. Creeping-thistle, we call it, from its peculiar 

 habits : for, besides its open mode of propagation by 

 its floating seeds, it has a sneaking trick of spreading 

 underground by its buried rootstock, which sends up 

 fresh stems every year from the joints or nodes. It is 

 the commonest of all its race not in England only, but 

 throughout the globe ; for its winged fruits have been 

 carried to every quarter of the world with seed-corn and 

 clovers. Cut it down, and a new head springs from 

 below the wound ; hack it close to the ground, and the 

 rootstock pushes out a fresh young shoot from an un- 

 suspected corner ; harrow it up bodily, and the seed 

 blows over at harvest-time from all the surrounding 

 fields, just at the right moment for the autumn ploughing. 



For hardiness of constitution it has no equal ; and 

 this is partly due, no doubt, to the fact that universal 

 cross-fertilisation has become absolutely certain by the 

 separation of the sexes on different plants. This globular 

 head that I have just swished off has none but stamen- 

 bearing florets ; this other more conical cluster, that I 

 am trying to cut with the aid of my knife and handker- 

 chief, contains nothing, on the contrary, but pistils and 

 seeds. Such careful separation of the two elements 

 perfectly ensures a good cross in each generation, and so 



