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. I think it is Linnaeus, who says, that while the
swine is rooting for acorns, he is planting acorns.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has
been, I have great faith in a seed--a, to me, equally mysterious origin