A STUDY 
OF SEED-DISPERSION IN LINCOLNSHIRE. 
Rev. E. ADRIAN WOODRUFFE-PEACOCK, 
Botanical Secretary Lincolnshire Naturalists’ Union, and Curator of 
Lincolnshire County Herbarium. 
In ‘The Origin of Species,’ ed. 6th, 1888, vol. II, p. 175, 
Charles Darwin says:—‘I do not believe that botanists are aware 
how charged the mud of ponds is with seed.’ In illustration he adds 
that some mud, taken from three different spots, beneath water, on 
the edge of a little pond, which when dried only weighed altogether 
6% ounces, yielded 537 seedling plants, pulled up as they came, in 
six months under a bell glass in his study, when a little pure water 
was added. This experiment is very suggestive, but would have 
been much more so had this learned author told us whether a stream 
or small ditch ran into his ‘little pond.’ As the subject is interesting 
from many aspects I have collected the following notes from several 
sources. 
A little stream rises in and around Caistor, on the Chalk Wold, 
and flows some 10 to 12 miles due west and falls into the river 
Ancholme, between the parishes of North Kelsey and Cadney-cum- 
Howsham. Its lower reaches and bends are full of sand washed 
down from the drift-deposits lying on the Chalk, Spilsby Sandstone, 
Tealby Limestone, and Kimeridge and Oxford Clays, which form the 
bed of the little watershed. When a dry summer comes the waters 
are turned into one of the land drains in the surrounding carrs, and 
two to three feet of sand is thrown out on to the banks to be led 
away as top-dressing for the peaty fields through which the beck 
flows. The waters this season were turned on the 23rd of May, and 
finally dammed on the 5th of June, when the beck slowly dried up 
for about a mile of its course. The sand varied a little in quality in 
different places, being especially rich, if we may judge from the flora, 
along that stretch which was cleaned out last season. Here and 
there, at a bend of the stream, the sand was much coarser and quite 
free from plants; the force of the current thrown to one side of the 
beck not having permitted the seeds to find a nidus. By the 
beginning of September in many places it was carpeted with 
vegetation from side to side, but as a rule the whole bed was only 
sporadically covered, for the species did not exist in the same 
numerical relation as on the watershed soils. The bank and edge 
flora retained their usual positions as if the waters were still flowing. 
Jan. 1894. 
