THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 
39 
glove, (Digitalis purpurea) another alien, will locate on the 
roadside if no better situation offers, and it is permitted so 
to do, covering unsightly hill-sides and adding to the luxuri- 
ous abundance of our flora. Under these circumstances it 
is liable to usurious rental for the mender of highways is 
accustomed to use the next at hand to fill up chuck-holes in 
the road in lieu of other brush. 
Its cousin german and next door neighbor is furze, 
( Ule.v Europaeus) , or ling as one old Scotsman told me, lin- 
gering lovingly on the word as though it were a full freight- 
ed argosy of youthful and cherished recollections. So home- 
sick for a sight of it that he wrote his old mother to send 
him some seed ''right away off". It is useful as a binder of 
the drifting sands about Shoal water bay and on the Ilwaco 
peninsula where that other Scotsman, David Douglas, in 
April, 1825, first saw his Piiius grandis, (properly, Abies 
grandis Lindley) and picked up Riibus specfabilis and 
Gaultheria Shallon. When once introduced it grows in riot- 
ous profusion and can be found in many localities from 
Vancouver Island southward to Point Arena, California. 
There is a small tract of two or three acres near a cer- 
tain "little red school house" contiguous to a village called 
Sunshine, although the house is now yellow and often the 
fog-blankets are full width and four thicknesses, yet the 
furze occupies this common to the exclusion of much of the 
other coastal shrubbery. Our western humming bird, Selas- 
phorus rufus, has colonized this forest of furze making it an 
annual breeding place. About the first of June any youthful 
chum could show you a dozen nests, about breast high, very 
little effort being made at concealment, wherein were eggs 
or fledgelings w^hile scores of solicitous parents were hover- 
ing almost in reach or darting hither and yon in an attempt 
to draw your attention from their tiny nests. From mid- 
January to mid-summer the bloom is very profuse, which 
