native forest from which seed could have been derived.

Dr. Dwight, in the second volume of his "Travels," mentions visiting a
town in Vermont (Panton, near Vergennes), in which a piece of land that
had been once cultivated, but was afterwards permitted to lie waste,
"yielded a thick and vigorous growth of hickory, _where there was not a
single hickory tree in any original forest within fifty miles of the
place_." Of this piece of land he says: "The native growth here was white
pine, of which I did not see a single stem in the whole grove of hickory."
He is greatly puzzled to account for this isolated growth of hickory, but
readily concludes that "the fruit was too heavy to be carried fifty miles
by birds; besides" he adds, "it is not eaten by any bird indigenous to
Vermont." And even if the birds had carried the nuts thither, not one of
them could have been planted there unless the nut-eating bird had been
caught and destroyed on the spot, and the nut released from its crop. This
might account for the appearance of a single tree, but not for a "whole
grove of hickory;" and the squirrels certainly could not have been
provident enough to plant any considerable grove in this particular
locality, and nowhere else within fifty miles of it. The winds could not
have borne them that distance without dropping a single nut by the way,
and there is only one supposition left, which is that indicated in the
Bible genesis.

While Dr. Dwight emphatically rejects the "transportation theory," he
imagined he had solved the difficulty in his suggestion "that the
cultivation of the land had brought up the seeds of a former forest,
within the limits of vegetation, and given them an opportunity to
vegetate." But the utter absurdity of this theory may be demonstrated by
any one inside of two years, by placing hickory nuts, in different soils,
at a depth to which an ordinary plough-point would reach in cultivation;