But
when the forest is removed, and the warmth of the sun admitted, they
immediately vegetate." Since he does not tell us on what observation his
remark is founded, I must doubt its truth. Besides, the experience of
nurserymen makes it the more questionable.
The stories of wheat raised from seed buried with an ancient Egyptian, and
of raspberries raised from seed found in the stomach of a man in England,
who is supposed to have died sixteen or seventeen hundred years ago, are
generally discredited, simply because the evidence is not conclusive.
Several men of science, Dr. Carpenter among them, have used the statement
that beach-plums sprang up in sand which was dug up forty miles inland in
Maine, to prove that the seed had lain there a very long time, and some
have inferred that the coast has receded so far. But it seems to me
necessary to their argument to show, first, that beach-plums grow only on
a beach. They are not uncommon here, which is about half that distance
from the shore; and I remember a dense patch a few miles north of us,
twenty-five miles inland, from which the fruit was annually carried to
market. How much further inland they grow, I know not. Dr. Chas. T.
Jackson speaks of finding "beach-plums" (perhaps they were this kind) more
than one hundred miles inland in Maine.
It chances that similar objections lie against all the more notorious
instances of the kind on record.
Yet I am prepared to believe that some seeds, especially small ones, may
retain their vitality for centuries under favorable circumstances. In the
spring of 1859, the old Hunt House, so called, in this town, whose chimney
bore the date 1703, was taken down. This stood on land which belonged to
John Winthrop, the first Governor of Massachusetts, and a part of the
house was evidently much older than the above date, and belonged to the
Winthrop family. For many years, I have ransacked this neighborhood for
plants, and I consider myself familiar with its productions. Thinking of
the seeds which are said to be sometimes dug up at an unusual depth in the
earth, and thus to reproduce long extinct plants, it occurred to me last
fall that some new or rare plants might have sprung up in the cellar of
this house, which had been covered from the light so long. Searching there
on the 22d of September, I found, among other rank weeds, a species of
nettle (_Urtica urens_), which I had not found before; dill, which I had
not seen growing spontaneously; the Jerusalem oak (_Chenopodium botrys_),
which I had seen wild in but one place; black nightshade (_Solanum
nigrum_), which is quite rare hereabouts, and common tobacco, which,
though it was often cultivated here in the last century, has for fifty
years been an unknown plant in this town, and a few months before this not
even I had heard that one man in the north part of the town, was
cultivating a few plants for his own use. I have no doubt that some or all
of these plants sprang from seeds which had long been buried under or
about that house, and that that tobacco is an additional evidence that the
plant was formerly cultivated here. The cellar has been filled up this
year, and four of those plants, including the tobacco, are now again
extinct in that locality.
It is true, I have shown that the animals consume a great part of the
seeds of trees, and so, at least, effectually prevent their becoming
trees; but in all these cases, as I have said, the consumer is compelled
to be at the same time the disperser and planter, and this is the tax
which he pays to nature.
