of America where open pastures offered suitable conditions. Asses, about fifty years after their introduction, ran wild and multiplied so amazingly in Quito, that the Spanish traveller Ulloa describes them as being a nuisance. They grazed together in great herds, defending themselves with their mouths, and if a horse strayed among them they all fell upon him and did not cease biting and kicking till they left him dead. Hogs were turned out in St. Domingo by Columbus in 1493, and the Spaniards took them to other places where they settled, the result being, that in about half a century these animals were found in great numbers over a large part of America, from 25° north to 40° south latitude. More recently, in New Zealand, pigs have multiplied so greatly in a wild state as to be a serious nuisance and injury to agriculture. To give some idea of their numbers, it is stated that in the province of Nelson there were killed in twenty months 25,000 wild pigs.[1] Now, in the case of all these animals, we know that in their native countries, and even in America at the present time, they do not increase at all in numbers; therefore the whole normal increase must be kept down, year by year, by natural or artificial means of destruction.
Rapid Increase and Wide Spread of Plants.
In the case of plants, the power of increase is even greater and its effects more distinctly visible. Hundreds of square miles of the plains of La Plata are now covered with two or three species of European thistle, often to the exclusion of almost every other plant; but in the native countries of these thistles they occupy, except in cultivated or waste ground, a very subordinate part in the vegetation. Some American plants, like the cotton-weed (Asclepias curussayica), have now become common weeds over a large portion of the tropics. White clover (Trifolium repens) spreads over all the temperate regions of the world, and in New Zealand is exterminating many native species, including even the native flax (Phormium
- ↑ Still more remarkable is the increase of rabbits both in New Zealand and Australia. No less than seven millions of rabbit-skins have been exported from the former country in a single year, their value being £67,000. In both countries, sheep-runs have been greatly deteriorated in value by the abundance of rabbits, which destroy the herbage; and in some cases they have had to be abandoned altogether.
