minal
bud of the sea-side golden-rod, standing in the sand early in July, and
also how turnips, beets, carrots, etc., flourished even in pure sand. A
man travelling by the shore near there not long before us noticed
something green growing in the pure sand of the beach, just at
high-water mark, and on approaching found it to be a bed of beets
flourishing vigorously, probably from seed washed out of the Franklin.
Also beets and turnips came up in the sea-weed used for manure in many
parts of the Cape. This suggests how various plants may have been
dispersed over the world to distant islands and continents. Vessels,
with seeds in their cargoes, destined for particular ports, where
perhaps they were not needed, have been cast away on desolate islands,
and though their crews perished, some of their seeds have been
preserved. Out of many kinds a few would find a soil and climate adapted
to them, become naturalized, and perhaps drive out the native plants at
last, and so fit the land for the habitation of man. It is an ill wind
that blows nobody any good, and for the time lamentable shipwrecks may
thus contribute a new vegetable to a continent's stock, and prove on the
whole a lasting blessing to its inhabitants. Or winds and currents might
effect the same without the intervention of man. What, indeed, are the
various succulent plants which grow on the beach but such beds of beets
and turnips, sprung originally from seeds which perhaps were cast on the
waters for this end, though we do not know the Franklin which they came
out of? In ancient times some Mr. Bell (?) was sailing this way in his
ark with seeds of rocket, saltwort, sandwort, beach-grass, samphire,
bayberry, poverty-grass, etc., all nicely labelled with directions,
intending to establish a nursery somewhere; and did not a nursery get
established, though he thought that he had failed?

About the light-house I observed in the summer the pretty _Polygala
polygama_, spreading ray-wise flat on the ground, white
pasture-thistles, (_Cirsium pumilum_,) and amid the shrubbery the
_Smilax glauca_, which is commonly said not to grow so far north. Near
the edge of the banks about half a mile southward, the broom-crowberry,
(_Empetrum Conradii_,) for which Plymouth is the only locality in
Massachusetts usually named, forms pretty green mounds four or five feet
in diameter by one foot high,--soft, springy beds for the wayfarer: I
saw it afterward in Provincetown. But prettiest