for ages in the ashy dryness of the Egyptian catacombs," believing that
they should be received with great caution, if not rejected altogether.
But why he should scruple about receiving these speculative accounts of
ancient Egyptian cereals, which are sometimes hawked about the country for
two and three dollars a seed, and, in the same breath, accept the absurder
theory that seeds may lie dormant for ages in soils where the hardest and
most enduring woods will utterly perish and disappear in a few brief
years, is wholly inexplicable to us, except as an hypothesis to force a
conclusion, or to account for the otherwise unaccountable alternations of
forest growths.

But the idea that nature has any cunning devices by which she may hide
seeds away where they will remain "almost imperishable" for ages, is not
entirely new with Professor Marsh, nor is it any suggestion that would
be protected by copyright. In finding the winds, birds, quadrupeds, and
other assumed agencies of distribution improbable, he seeks, with Dr.
Dwight, for "the seeds of an ancient vegetation," and, finding none by
actual observation, concludes that nature has some occult, and
thoroughly surreptitious, method of hiding them away, even in soils
below the last glacial drift, where no microscope can possibly reach
them. As the accounts of seeds taken from the mummy-cases of Egypt may
answer the purposes of those seeking to palm off some new cereal as a
nine-days wonder on the ignorant, so these speculations about the
indestructibility of seeds, when hidden away by nature, may answer a
like purpose in imposing upon the over-credulous; but they will hardly
be accepted by the intelligent, much less the scientific, in the light
of all the facts herein given. The simple truth is that all seeds are
speedily perishable by out-door exposure. We hardly know a single seed
that will survive beyond the second year when subjected to such
exposure. If they do not germinate the first year, their vitality is