Note 47 — Chapter II
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The vegetables which, so far as we know their history, seem to have been longest the objects of human care, can, by painstaking industry, be made to grow under a great variety of circumstances, and some of them—the vine for instance—prosper nearly equally well, when planted and tended, on soils of almost any geological character; but their seeds vegetate only in artificially prepared ground, they have little self-sustaining power, and they soon perish when the nursing hand of man is withdrawn from them. In range of climate, wild plants are much more limited than domestic, but much less so with regard to the state of the soil in which they germinate and grow. See Appendix, No. 9.
Dr. Dwight remarks that the seeds of American forest trees will not vegetate when dropped on grassland. This is one of the very few errors of personal observation to be found in that author's writings. There are seasons, indeed, when few tree seeds germinate in the meadows and the pastures, and years favorable to one species are not always propitious to another; but there is no American forest tree known to me which does not readily propagate itself by seed in the thickest greensward, if its germs are not disturbed by man or animals.