Thwaites, in his _Enumeration of Ceylon
Plants_, that a plant introduced into the island less than fifty years
ago is helping to alter the character of the vegetation up to an
elevation of 3000 feet. This is the Lantana mixta, a verbenaceous plant
introduced from the West Indies, which appears to have found in Ceylon
a soil and climate exactly suited to it. It now covers thousands of
acres with its dense masses of foliage, taking complete possession of
land where cultivation has been neglected or abandoned, preventing the
growth of any other plants, and even destroying small trees, the tops of
which its subscandent stems are able to reach. The fruit of this plant
is so acceptable to frugivorous birds of all kinds that, through their
instrumentality, it is spreading rapidly, to the complete exclusion of
the indigenous vegetation where it becomes established.
_Great Fertility not essential to Rapid Increase_.
The not uncommon circumstance of slow-breeding animals being very
numerous, shows that it is usually the amount of destruction which an
animal or plant is exposed to, not its rapid multiplication, that
determines its numbers in any country.
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