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