24 
A. E. GIBBS-SEEDS AND FETTITS. 
settlers the seed of a leek as a special favour, and now it has over¬ 
run whole districts, while the common dock is widely disseminated 
and will remain for ever a proof of the rascality of the Englishman 
who sold the seeds as those of the tobacco plant. 
With every sack of wheat seed that is imported there is sure to 
he introduced some seeds of plants that grew with it in the harvest- 
field, and not only do these seeds—which it is difficult to banish 
from the best cleaned sample—spring up and flourish, hut, by a 
variety of means of which he little dreams, man becomes the agent 
by which plants are distributed over the earth. They are con¬ 
veyed by the trader in his merchandise, the sailor in his ballast, 
the soldier in his accoutrements, and in a hundred other ways. 
Since the introduction of foreign wools into England many plants 
from wool-producing countries in distant parts of the globe have 
sprung up in the vicinity of the places where the wool is washed 
and bleached. In our own county, at Ware, are extensive brick¬ 
fields, and the river Lea is navigable for barges as far as that town. 
The barges here discharge their loads of ashes and rubbish used 
in brickmaking, and re-load with bricks. Mr. E. T. Andrews, of 
Hertford, one day pointed out to me the place where they unload, 
as a favourite botanical hunting-ground of his, for he had found 
there a great number of casual plants whose seeds had been brought 
thus in the barges. In the same neighbourhood, too, there are oil 
mills, and many strange plants are introduced with the linseed. 
A curious case illustrative of the unintentional transportation of 
plants through human agency is found in the fact that a few years 
after Thorwaldsen’s sculptures had been unpacked in Copenhagen, 
twenty-five different Italian plants sprang up in the court-yard 
of the museum, the seeds having been conveyed in the hay and 
straw which had accompanied the works of art from Eome. 
The march of armies can sometimes he traced by the plants 
which spring up in their track. In 1814 the Eussian troops 
brought, in the stuffing of their saddles, seeds from the Dnieper 
and the Don to the valley of the Ehone, and even introduced the 
plants of the steppes into the environs of Paris. A tale is told, for 
which Sir Bartle Erere is responsible, that the date-palm has sprung 
up in isolated patches along the line of route taken by the army of 
Alexander the Great on its return from India, and local tradition 
ascribes their presence to the stones dropped by the soldiers. 
However that may be, enough has been said to show what a 
marvellous power man has exercised in modifying the flora of the 
earth’s surface. 
