$kfo=<5?tijjlan&s Earittrs. 99 



Poplar, but differing in leaf. 1 



Plumb Tree, feveral kinds, bearing fome long, round, 

 white, yellow, red, and black Plums; all differing in their 

 Fruit from thofe in England?' 



Wild Purcelane? 



Wood-wax, wherewith they dye many pretty Colours. 4 



species are peculiar to this continent. — See the author's Voyages, p. 69, for an- 

 other mention of the birches. 



1 Populus, L. Our species are peculiar to the country, as the author's remark 

 suggests. Wood (J. c.) notices " the ever-trembling asps." 



2 "The plumbs of the country be better for plumbs than the cherries be for 

 cherries. They be black and yellow ; about the bigness of damsons ; of a reason- 

 able good taste." — Nevj-Eng. Prospect, chap. v. Primus maritima, Wangenh. 

 (beech-plum), and P. Americana, Marsh, (wild yellow plum), are no doubt here 

 intended ; as also, it is likely, by Josselyn, who, it is evident, in this place had 

 only the genus in mind as ''common with us in England." — See p. 61 for the 

 author's mention of the "wild cherry." 



3 Portulaca oleracea, L. (Gerard, p. 521). " In cornfields. It is eaten as a 

 pot-herb, and esteemed by some as little inferior to asparagus." — Cutler; Ac- 

 count of Indigenous Vegetables (1785), /. c, p. 447. Considered to have been 

 introduced here ; but our author enables us to carry back the date of its introduc- 

 tion, without reasonable doubt, to the first settlement of the country. " Purslain, 

 Mr. Glover says, is also very common in Virginia, and troublesome too, to the 

 tobacco-planters." Sir Philip Skippon to Ray, Feb. 11, 1675-6, in Ray Society's 

 Corresp-. of John Ray, p. 121. Mr. Xuttall regarded the species as indigenous on 

 the plains of the Missouri; but this plant, "too closely resembling the common 

 purslane," according to Prof. Gray (Man., p. 64), has been separated as specifi- 

 cally distindt by Dr. Engelmann. 



4 Genista tincloria, L. ( Genistella tincloria, — greenweed, or dyers' weed ; 

 Gerard, p. 1316). "We shall not need to speake of the use that diers make 

 thereof," says the latter. Our author could hardly have been mistaken about so 

 well-known a plant as this; which he probably met with in one of his visits to 

 the neighborhood of Boston, — long the only American station for it. There is a 

 tradition that it was introduced here by Gov. Endicott; which may have been 

 some forty years before Josselyn finished his herborizing, — enough to account for 

 its naturalization then. It was long confined to Salem ("pastures between New 

 Mills and Salem," — Cutler, I. c, 1785); but occurred to me sparingly, in 1841, 

 on the shores of Cambridge Bay, and also on roadsides in Old Cambridge. 

 " Woad-seed " is set down, in a memorandum of the Governor and Company of 



