530 
We have next to consider what chance there is that 
organisms thus carried into a distant sphere will be able to 
establish themselves therein. In the case of seeds thus 
wafted to a new sphere—will they germinate and establish 
themselves ? Clearly we must not anticipate this result 
as a matter of course. Mr. Wallace adduces certain facts 
which may warn us against any very great confidence on 
this point. He says :— 
“ Of the many hundreds of hardy plants which produce seed freely 
in our gardens, very few ever run wild, and hardly any have become 
common. . . . A. de Candolle states that several botanists of 
Paris, Geneva, and especially of Montpellier, have sown the seeds of 
many hundreds of species of hardy exotic plants, in what appeared 
to be the most favourable situations, but that in hardly a single case 
has any one of them become naturalised. Even a plant like the 
potato, so widely cultivated, so hardy and so well adapted to 
spread by means of its many-eyed tubers, has not established itself, 
in a wild state, in any part of Europe. It would be thought that 
Australian plants would easily run wild in New Zealand. But Sir 
Joseph Hooker informs us that the late Mr. Bidwell habitually 
scattered Australian seeds during his extensive travels in New 
Zealand, yet only two or three Australian plants appear to have 
established themselves in that country, and these only in cultivated 
or newly moved soil.”— {Darwinism, pp. 13-16.) 
Mr. Darwin says :— 
“Almost every year one or two land-birds are blown across the 
whole Atlantic Ocean, from North America to the western shores of 
Ireland and England, but seeds could be transported by these rare 
wanderers only by one means—namely, by dirt adhering to their feet 
or beaks, which is in itself a rare accident. Even in this case, how 
small would be the chance of a seed falling on favourable soil and 
coming to maturity ! But it would be a great error to argue that 
because a well-stocked island, like Great Britain, has not, as far as is 
known (and it would be very difficult to prove this), received within 
the last few centuries, through occasional means of transport, immi 
grants from Europe or any other continent—that a poorly-stocked 
island, though standing more remote from the main land, would not 
receive colonists by similar means. Out of a hundred kinds of seeds 
or animals transported to an island, even if far less well-stocked than 
Britain, perhaps not more than one would be so well fitted to its new