210 
NATURE NOTES. 
of a sand-pit, below twenty-five feet in thickness of stratified 
sand. Mr. Kemp thought that a lake had once been formed at 
the place, long before the Roman period, by the Tweed. On 
sowing the seeds they proved to be Polygonum avicttlare, P. Con- 
volvulus, and an Atriplex, not lake or water-plants at all. Mr. 
Kemp’s description of his experiment in his own words in a 
letter to my father, which I now have before me, together with 
his dried specimens, is as follows ; dated Galashiels, Sept. 22nd, 
1843 : — “ I sew (sic) a little in pots wich (sic) I kept in the house 
admiting (sic) air by the window, and a part in my garden, &c.” 
Now, as the plants raised are the commonest of weeds, and as 
not even Mr. Kemp himself, but a workman, who was excavat- 
ing the finer sand, first saw them, there is no proof whatever 
that the seeds had not blown down from above. Moreover, Mr. 
Kemp says nothing about the earth in which he grew them, 
either in the pot or in his garden, having been first tested to see 
that there were none in it. Consequently, this case breaks down, 
as being entirely devoid of strict scientific accuracy. 
It has been noticed over and over again, that when the sub- 
soil is first exposed, as on railway embankments, &c., plants 
suddenly appear which cannot be easily accounted for. To test 
the idea that seeds lie dormant beneath the surface, on an occa- 
sion when turf had to be removed at Kew, the Director had a 
portion of the exposed soil protected, the rest being left open. 
After a time, the latter was covered with plants, while the 
former had none : clearly showing that the seeds had come to it 
and had not been previously within the soil. On the other hand, 
cases do occur when plants, quite unknown in the neighbourhood 
before, suddenly appear. I have, for example, a specimen of 
Camelina saliva, a quantity of which came up in a railway cutting 
made at Steyning, Sussex, in the year 1859. I had never seen 
it anywhere there before, and it disappeared afterwards. As 
another remarkable coincidence of a sudden appearance. Sisym- 
brium Irio, the London rocket, may be mentioned. Ray remarks 
that, after the Great Fire of London, this plant came up abun- 
dantly among the rubbish in the ruins. Baxter, in his Genera of 
British Plants, observes: — “ A circumstance somewhat analogous 
to the above occurred this season in the Oxford Botanic Garden. 
During the time the alterations were going on in the garden last 
year (1834), the rubbish was remov'ed to a piece of ground on the 
outside of the walls ; this rubbish, as it accumulated, was set 
fire to from time to time, and was frequently burning for two or 
three days together, so that in the course of the season a con- 
siderable quantity of ashes was produced. Having received, 
in the spring of the present year (1835) a valuable collection of 
cuttings of nearly all the species of British willows, from W. 
Borrer, Esq., of Henfield, Sussex, this was the only piece of 
ground which we could appropriate as a salicetum, and in order 
to prepare it for the reception of the cuttings, the ashes were 
spread regularly over the surface, and the whole of it was 
