Canadian Agriculture. 
333 
It is to be regretted that, although this is the twelfth annual 
report, it contains no summary of the results of the eleven 
preceding years' observations, which would undoubtedly have en- 
hanced the value of the publication, besides affording useful figures 
both for comparison and for the foundation of general statements. 
The flora of Eastern Canada, and indeed of the Atlantic 
borders of North America generally, presents a similarity to 
that of the other side of the ocean which cannot fail to attract 
notice, but, in receding westward or southward, the similarities 
are found to be overshadowed by the differences. As bearing 
on this interesting subject, I take the following remarks from 
Professor Asa Gray's paper on the ' Characteristics of the North 
American Flora ' : — 
"In the fields and along open roadsides the likeness (to the flora of Western 
Europe) seems to be greater. But much of this likeness is the unconscious 
work of man, rather than of nature, the reason of which is not far to seek. 
This was a region of forest, upon which the aborigines, although they here 
and there opened patches of land for cultivation, had made no permanent 
encroachment. Not very much of the herbaceous or other low undergrowth 
of this forest could bear exposure to the fervid summer's sun ; and the change 
was too abrupt for adaptive modification. The plains and prairies of the 
great Mississippi Talley were then too remote for their vegetation to compete 
for the vacancy which was made here when forest was changed to grain-fields 
and then to meadow and pasture. And so the vacancy came to be filled in a 
notable measure by agrestial plants from Europe, the seeds of which came in 
seed-grain, in the coats and fleece and in the imported fodder of cattle and 
sheep, and in the various but not always apparent ways in which agricultural 
and commercial people unwittingly convey the plants and animals of one 
country to another. So, while an agricultural people displaced the aborigines 
which the forest sheltered and nourished, the herbs, purposely or accidentally 
brought with them, took possession of the clearings, and prevailed more or 
less over the native and rightful heirs to the soil, — not enough to supplant 
them, indeed, but enough to impart a certain adventitious Old World aspect to 
the fields and other open grounds, as well as to the precincts of habitations. 
In spring-time you would have seen the fields of this district (Montreal) 
yellow with European Buttercups and Dandelions, then whitened with the 
Ox-eye Daisy, and at midsummer brightened by the cerulean blue of Chicory. 
I can hardly name any native herbs which in the fields and at the season can 
vie with these intruders in floral show. The common Barberry of the Old 
World is an early denizen of New England. The tall Mullein, of a wholly 
alien race, shoots up in every j^asture and new clearing, accompanied by the 
common Thistle, while another imported Thistle, called in the States ' the 
Canada Thistle,' has become a veritable nuisance, at which much legislation 
has been levelled in vain. . . . 
" Opportunity may count for more than exceptional vigour ; and the cases 
in which foreign plants have shown such superiority are mainly those in 
which a forest-destroying people have brought upon newly-bared soil the 
seeds of an open-ground vegetation. . . . 
"That it is opportunity rather than specially acquired vigour that has given 
Old World weeds an advantage may be inferred from the behaviour of our 
weeds indigenous to the country, the plants of the unwooded districts — 
prairies or savannas west and south — which, now that the way is open, are 
coming in one by one into these eastern parts, extending their area continually, 
and holding their ground quite as pertinaciously as the immigrant denizens. 
Almost every year gives new examples of the immigration of campestrine 
