are exterminated. Yet these very weeds—
taking the word in its commonly accepted
signification, and in no way referring to
what we call wild flowers—present many
features of interest, to a few of which it is
our purpose to direct the reader's attention.

First of all, what is a weed? The answer
might appear to be easy; yet this
question provoked, only two years ago, a
discussion among scientific men, which
showed that opinions, even on so trifling
a subject, were by no means unanimous.
Dr. Berthold Seemann, whose extensive
acquaintance with the plants of various
lands in their native haunts entitles his
opinion to careful consideration, defines a
weed as " a naturalised herb, which has a
soft and membranaceous look, grows fast,
propagates its kind with great rapidity,
and spreads, to the prejudice of endemic or
cultivated plants, in places in some way or
other disturbed by the agency of man."
There is much that is good in this definition,
but some of the points of it are not
essential to the character of a weed. In
the first place, a weed need not be
naturalised. Such plants as the troublesome
couch-grass, the coltsfoot, and the chick-weed
certainly come under this category,
and their nativity is, so far as we know,
unquestioned; and of these the two first
have not the " soft and membranaceous
look" which Dr. Seemann requires of a
weed. We may, in preference, take the
opinion of Dr. Trimen, who says, " A weed
is any plant, irrespective of origin or
appearance, occurring in cultivated ground, in
addition to, and therefore more or less
interfering with, and injurious to, the crop
intended to be grown'. A plant is a weed only
in virtue of its situation; it may be an
ornamental or even a useful plant in its place, but
out of that place it becomes a weed. A
sunflower in a field of turnips is as much a weed
as Brassica napus (the turnip) in a
flower-garden, but reverse their situations and
the term is inapplicable to either." This
is certainly the sense in which the word is
most usually understood, and may be taken
as a satisfactory definition of its meaning.

But about the word itself there is something
to be said. The term weed has its
full equivalent in very few languages,
which is the more remarkable, in that the
thing which it represents is a universal
accompaniment of civilisation. According
to Dr. Seemann, the word, "through the
Low German verb wüen, to weed, the
Bavarian wüteln, and the High German
wuchern, to spread or multiply with more
than ordinary rapidity, is connected with
Wodan, or Wuotan (Odin), the name of
the supreme, all-overpowering, irresistible
Saxon god, to whom Wednesday, or
Wodensday, is dedicated. Singularly enough,
the High German form for ' to weed ' is
lost, and replaced by the word jæten,
pronounced gæten in some districts. I was
very much puzzled about the derivation of
this word, till I remembered that Gæt was
one of the names of the god Wuotan." This ,
derivation is ingenious, and possibly correct,
but a more obvious explanation is that
which connects it with the Anglo-Saxon
weod, which originally signified not only
weed, but also herb or grass generally; in
this sense it is used by Spenser and others
among the older writers. In the Promptorium
Parvulorum (about 1440) we have
"wed, fro noyows wedys (wede as a man
wedyth corne);" " weed, or wyyld herbe;"
and " wede, corn or herbys." From the
last of these it must not be supposed that
wheat is but another form of weed; its
origin, according to Mr. Palgrave, is the
Saxon hwete, meaning white, or the white
grain, so that the distinctive phrase white
wheat is a curious tautology. Whether the
Anglo-Saxon weod is connected with wæd,
meaning clothing, a word we still retain
in widows' weeds, we must leave to abler
philologists to determine.

Where weeds come from it is not always
easy to tell. Just as we have in our
gardens plants of which the native country
is uncertain—of which the white lily,
mignonette, walnut, and horse-chestnut are
familiar examples—so, many of our
commonest weeds are unknown in a state
removed from cultivation. In illustration
of this, we need only name the groundsel
and shepherd's purse, of which Dr. Hooker
says that in his many travels he has never
seen either of them established where the
soil was undisturbed, or where, if undisturbed,
they had not obviously been
brought by man or the lower animals.
Besides these, we may include in our list
the greater number, if not all, of the large
class of plants which Mr. Watson terms
"colonists"—such as poppies, cockle,
fumitory, red nettle, and a host of cornfield
weeds which owe their introduction to
the hand of man, are not found beyond
cultivation, and, if the country could
lapse to its original state, would in all
probability entirely disappear. At first
sight it is difficult to realise that plants,
which we have been accustomed to see
growing far and wide throughout the