Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/387

Rh number of plant species, however, which are characteristic of our pastures and fallow fields, involves another point of view as to their former distribution.

The aboriginal flora of the Atlantic slope was unquestionably composed of shade-loving species. Kalm, in a very interesting and suggestive paragraph in his "Travels," noted this fact as early as the year 1748. Save along the river marshes and seacoast, or in widely scattered glades and beaver meadows throughout the forest region, there was little encouragement to the growth of meadow plants as we know them to-day. A striking fact in the distribution of our eastern flora is the comparatively large numbers of species that have found their way across the ocean from the shores of Europe and have become naturalized in our fields. These immigrants are for the most part "weeds" which everywhere find congenial surroundings throughout our cultivated lands, and like the human immigrants thrive apace. They are rank growers of great fecundity and have gained an ill reputation among the farmers. Some of them, as the big white daisy and the buttercups, in out-of-the-way districts where the standard of farming is low, form the chief hay crop, and the daisy is said, by way of extenuation, to possess milk-making qualities. The names of these instrudersintruders [sic] are familiar to most of us, possibly more familiar to many than those of native growth. Daisy, buttercup, toad-flax, mullein, burdock, cockle-bur, dandelion, the common St. John's wort, self-heal, lamb's quarters, field-sorrel, smartweed, and many more are among the throng that early made a new home for themselves in the cleared land. It is hardly likely that these same plants would have gained a foothold had the land remained in its primitive forest-covered state, for they are all light-loving species, thriving in the open expanse of fields. Many indigenous species, as the Joe-Pye weeds or thoroughworts and the tickseeds and others of more or less moist habitats have undoubtedly greatly increased their range since the days of settlement, spreading out from river borders into the low meadow lands. One interesting plant is unquestionably a rather recent migrant from the prairie country. This is the Black-eyed Susan or cone flower which has found its way into eastern fields with clover seed brought from the west. Doubtless it was in some such manner that the host of European species that now adorn this land found a means of transit, for much grass seed and grain was brought over by the colonists. Nearly all the grasses of our fields belong to European species that have become naturalized. The native grasses appear, for the most part, to have been annual species that grew in the woods, at least in certain districts. Kalm has an interesting observation on this point. While staying with the Swedes at their village on the Delaware in the autumn of 1748 one of the old inhabitants told Kalm that in his youth "there was grass in the woods which grew very close, and was everywhere two feet high,"