222 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



which must have clung accidentally to the spade used 

 to dig the grave of a sailor, around which the intrusive 

 little plant was observed to flourish in great luxuriance. 

 Such facts as these we all know and expect : it seems 

 fit and proper that the familiar weeds of cultivation 

 should follow civilised tillage on its widening way over 

 the world. But we are more surprised when we find 

 that a good many American weeds have also forced 

 their way eastward — against the stream, so to speak — 

 and have invaded the Old World, en revanche^ with the 

 potatoes and the maize, achieving such success as to 

 have lived down more than one of their European 

 compeers. In southern France and Italy the number 

 of these eastward immigrants is very considerable ; and 

 even in wetter and chillier England, a poor foster-mother 

 for children of the basking American plains, it is far from 

 being either small or unnoticeable. Such cases are not 

 in themselves at all more remarkable than those of the 

 phylloxera, which has already made good its footing in 

 Europe, or of the Colorado beetle, which we are now 

 endeavouring feebly to repel ; but they seem more curious 

 at first sight, because the aggressiveness of fixed and un- 

 conscious plants is harder to understand than the aggres- 

 siveness of locomotive and volitional animal organisms. 



Two of these American wood-sorrels, both with 

 yellow flowers, have now made themselves a permanent 

 home in England, and have even conquered their admis- 

 sion within the exclusive lists of the British flora. One 

 of them has long been a universal weed in all hot 

 climates of the globe and in most temperate ones, having 

 followed the tobacco-plant to Syria and Java and accom- 

 panied the tomato to all the warmer climates of Mediter- 



