174 THE VEGETABLE WORLD. 
“The first colonies which were sprinkled over each continent,” 
says this learned botanist, “probably carried with them several 
species of useful plants, and especially some of those seeds which get 
attached to clothes and to domestic animals, and which will grow 
easily in the neighbourhood of dwellings, near dung hills, burnt 
ground, and rubbish heaps. The scantier the population, and the 
more foreign it is to the arts of civilisation, the more insignificant 
become these primary seed-carryings. When the population be- 
comes denser and more civilised, when agriculture begins and 
extends its rule, then the occasions are multiplied for the trans- 
port of seeds. A hunting or pastoral people, no doubt, traverse a 
vast extent of country, but an agricultural people prepare ground 
fit for the reception of new species, and bring the seed for their 
fields from more or less distant countries, introducing with it 
different plants, many of which naturally grow wild. In short, 
war has created vast empires, and compelled men to make numerous 
journeys ; navigation has extended itself, new countries have been 
brought in communication with the old, agriculture has exported 
its products, and horticulture has stocked our gardens with 
thousands of foreign species. By all these means the transport of 
seeds has become increasingly great, and an influence has been 
exercised quite preponderating over natural causes.” 
Commerce, which carries in its ships the products of the trading 
of nations, furnishing Europe with the produce of the New World 
and returning to it European productions in exchange, is some- 
times an indirect agent in the transport of vegetable seeds. The 
wool from the sheep of Buenos Ayres, Mexico, or La Plata, when 
it is brought into Europe, carries entangled in the fleeces the seed 
and remnants of plants in those countries. When the fleeces 
arrive in Europe, they are cleaned, beaten, and washed, and the 
seeds fall off; they may then shoot in this new soil, and transplant 
into our climate the vegetable species from regions across the 
Atlantic. At the edge of the river Lez, near Montpellier, at 4 
place called Port Juvenal, the American wools are received to 
cleaned and purified, and then sold to the cloth-makers of Lodéve. 
Seeds of American plants, which have been brought in these 
fleeces, have actually sprung up in the environs of Montpellier, 8° 
much so that all the celebrated botanists of Montpellier, such as 
