1879. | Distribution of the North American Flora. 155 
THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE NORTH AMERICAN 
FLORA 
BY SIR JOSEPH DALTON HOOKER. 
Wee countries beyond the seas we may visit, in the 
temperate regions of the globe, we find that their vegetation 
has been invaded, and in many cases profoundly modified by 
immigrant plants from other countries, and these are in almost 
all cases natives of North-western Europe. Nearly forty years 
ago I arrived at night at the Falkland islands, when a boat was 
sent ashore to communicate the ship’s arrival to the Governor; 
and, being eager to know something of the vegetation of the 
islands, I asked the officer in charge of the boat to pluck for me 
any plants he could feel for, as it was too dark to see anything, 
and the armful he brought to me consisted of nothing but the 
English shepherd’s purse. On another occasion, landing on a 
small uninhabited island,? nearly at the Antipodes, the first evi- 
dence I met with of its having been previously visited by man, 
was the English chickweed; and this I traced toa mound that 
marked the grave of a British sailor, and that was covered with 
the plant, doubtless the offspring of seed that had adhered to the 
spade or mattock with which the grave had been dug. 
It was hence no surprise to me to find myself, on landing at 
Boston last summer, greeted by Western European plants that 
had established themselves as colonists in New England. Of 
these the first was the wild chicory, growing far more luxuriantly 
than I ever saw it do elsewhere, forming a tangled mass of stems 
and branches, studded with turquoise-blue blossoms, and covering 
acres of ground; the very next piants that attracted my attention 
were the oxeye-daisy and Mayweed, which together whitened the 
banks in some places, and which I subsequently tracked more 
than half way across the continent. ! 
These, and more than two hundred and fifty other Old England 
plants, which are now peopling New England, were for the most 
part fellow-emigrants and fellow-colonists with the Anglo-Saxon, 
having (as seeds) accompanied him across the Atlantic, and hav- 
ing, like him, asserted their supremacy over and displaced a cer- 
tain number of natives of the soil. 
1A lecture by Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, K.C.S.I., Pres. R. S., delivered on 
April 12, 1878, before the members of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. [Re- 
EIT from the Gardeners’ Chronicle, August, 1878. i o 
2 Lord Aukland’s island, south of New Zealand 
