74. FAMILIAR TREES 
poets, tell in favour of personal knowledge on the 
part of the writer. 
After centuries of cultivation, it is extremely dif- 
ficult to speak with any confidence as to the truly 
indigenous character of any plant from its present 
mode of occurrence. Buildings and gardens may have 
existed on spots where their former presence would 
not now be suspected: the non-human methods of 
seed-dispersal, the wind, the fleeces in which burrs 
become entangled, squirrels, dormice, and fruit-eating 
birds, have been in operation year by year, until we 
may almost imagine the seed of every species in the 
country to have had an opportunity of sprouting on 
every inch of our land. Woods, too, have been so 
artificialised by felling, clearing, and replanting, that 
we can hardly consider any of them much more truly 
primeval than our hedgerows ; and plants once culti- 
vated may have had time in the lapse of centuries 
even to degenerate to a more primitive wild type. If, 
however, we find a species, which is not likely ever to 
have been planted in woodlands, uniformly distributed 
over a wide area, growing in the heart of forests and 
woods of mixed species, and always presenting marked 
characteristics unlike its cultivatedrepresentative, there 
is some considerable a priori probability of its being 
wild. Judged by this test, we have little hesitation in 
considering the Medlar indigenous in northern France; 
but we are far less confident as to its having any claim 
to beso classed on this side of the Channel, unless, per- 
haps, in the extreme south of our island. 
The name Mespilus, or rather its Greek original 
Mespilon, dates from Theophrastus, and it seems to 
