More civilized countries even have not left us without similar, though isolated instances of men who have found a dwelling in the trees of the forest. Evelyn tells us of the huge trunk of an oak in Oxfordshire, which served long as a prison for felons; and he who lived in the shades of old Selborne so lovely and sweet, mentions an elm on Blechington Green, which gave for months reception and shelter to a poor woman, whom the inhospitable people would not receive into their houses. When she reappeared among them he says, she held a lusty boy in her arms. Men are, however, more frequently buried than born in trees. The natives of the eastern coast of Africa, hollow out soft, worm-eaten Baobabs, and bury in them those who are suspected of holding communion with evil spirits. Their bodies, thus suspended in the dry chambers of the trunk, soon become perfect mummies. The Indians of Maine had a more touching custom of the kind. They used to turn up a young maple-tree, place the body of a dead chief underneath, and then let the roots spring back, thus erecting a sylvan monument to his memory.

Thus it is that vegetable and animal life go hand in hand, showing that beautiful bond of love, which pervades all nature, even in its minor parts; where there is life, there are plants, and on land and on water, on the loftiest mountain top, and in the very bowels of the earth, every where does man find a plant to minister to his support and enjoyment, every where he sees plants quietly and mysteriously perform their humble duty in the great household of nature. Plants alone-it would at first sight appear-have no home, for they seem to be at home every where. Turn up the soil, where you will, to any depth, and such a rich abundance of vegetable life is mixed with the loam, that almost instantaneously plants innumerable spring up from seeds, which may have lain slumbering for thousands of years in the warm bosom of our mother earth. Man himself cannot master this exuberance of vegetable life. He may change it by cultivation, it is true, but that also only for a time. And what is a generation, or two, in comparison with the eternal earth? Do not even in our day, and before our eyes, lofty trees raise their proud heads, where our fathers cut the green turf with their sharp plough? In vain does man take the Alpine rose from the banks of its pure mountain brook and plant it in the lowly valley; in vain does he bring costly seeds from the Indies and the warm climes of the tropics, even to the ice-clad coast of Norway.

They live and pine and die. It is true, he sometimes seeks to reverse nature itself. He places bubbling fountains on the top of high hills, and plants lime-trees and poplars between great masses of rocks; vineyards must adorn his valleys, and meadows spread their soft velvet over mountain sides. But the poet of old already has taught us, that you may drive out nature even with the pitchfork, and yet she will ever return. A few years' neglect, and how quickly she resumes her sway! Artificial lakes become gloomy marshes, bowers are filled with countless briers, and stately avenues overgrown with reckless profusion. The plants of the soil declare war against the intruders from abroad, and claim once more their birthright to the land of their fathers. The fine welltrimmed turf is smothered under a thousand coarser plants, rank grass and fat clover overspread the exotics; briers climb up with the aid of hooks and ladders, as if they were storming a fortress; nettles fill the urns of statues with their thick tufts, and unsightly mosses creep upon the very faces of marble beauties. Wild cherrytrees and maples seize on every cornice and cleft of every stately mansion; hardy invincible roots penetrate into the slightest opening, until at last victory is declared, and the trees of the forest wave their rich foliage over the high turrets, and raise triumphantly on spire and pinnacle, the gorgeous banner of Nature.

There is high life and low life among plants, as among men. The stately palm raises its high, unbroken pillar, crowned with sculptured verdures, only in the hot vapors of Brazilian forests and tropical climes, and like a true "king of the grasses," as the ancient Indians called the noble tree, it must need fare sumptuously and upon the richest of earth's gifts, before it justifies the prophet's saying, that "the righteous shall flourish like the palm-tree." How humble, by its side, the lowly moss, barely visible to the naked eye, clad in most modest garb, and yet faithfully covering with its warm mantle the dreary, weatherbeaten boulders of northern granite, or carpeting our damp grottos, and making them resplendent with its phosporescent verdure! brilliant flower of Queen Victoria's namesake, the most superb cradle in which child was ever rocked, must needs float its rosy leaves on the warm bosom of the silent lakes of Guiana, and the Aristolochia of South America, whose flowers are large enough to serve Indian boys as hats or helmets, deigns not to live, unless it can bathe its delicate roots in the shady waters

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of the Magdalen River. Theirs is the warm golden light of the sun, theirs the richest of soils, the purest of waters, an everlasting summer, an unbroken enjoyment. And yet, are they really more beauteous and graceful than the humble house-leek, which flourishes under circumstances that would be fatal to almost all other plants? In the very driest places, where not a blade of grass, not a spire of moss can grow, on naked rocks, old crumbling walls, or sandy, scorched plains, these step-children of nature are seen to prosper and to thrive. Alternately exposed to the heaviest dew at night, and the fiercest rays of the noonday sun, they withstand all, and live upon so small a particle of soil, that it seems to them more a means of keeping them stationary, than a source of nutriment. Rock-roses bear that name, because they will only flourish in dry, rocky places, where other plants would never find a due supply of moisture.

These

rocks they are industriously engaged in ornamenting with a profusion of brilliantly colored flowers, for nature loves to combine every where the beautiful with the useful. Still, their beauty is but shortlived; their blossoms usually expand at night, and after a few hours' exposure to the sun, they perish. But their long evergreen branches, trail year after year, with great beauty over the rough banks and rocky cliffs that give them a shelter and a home. The very sand of the sea, dry, and drifting at the mercy of the waves, fickle and false to a proverb, is not too poor for a most useful plant, the so-called sand-reed. It has no beauty of form to please the eye, no delicacy of structure to engage our attention, the cattle themselves will not touch it. But when planted by the hand of man, to give firmness to dikes and embankments, it pierces them with an entangled web of living structure, which offers a resistance stronger than that of the gigantic walls of fabled Cyclops, and is but rarely overcome by the violence of the storm and the fury of the waves. The loose sand of South American deserts still harbors little cacti, so small, and so slightly rooted in their unstable home, that they get between the toe of the Indian-and even the fearful deserts of Africa, those huge seas of sand without a shadow, are at least surrounded by forest shores, clothed in perpetual verdure; even there a few solitary palmtrees, sighing in loneliness for the sweet rivulets of the oasis, are scattered over the awful solitude, and wherever a tiny thread of water passes half concealed through the endless waves of sand, a

line of luxuriant green, marks it to the exhausted traveller, and reminds him of the green pasture and still waters of Holy Writ.

Nor are plants dwellers upon land only the waters also teem with vegetable life, and the bed of the mighty ocean is planted with immense submarine forests, and a thousand varied herbs, from the gigantic fucus, which grows to the length of many hundred feet, and far exceeds the height of the tallest tree known, to the little yellow blossom of the duckweed on our ponds. Every river has its own reed; some, covered with snow for part of the year, hardly rise above the sluggish, silent waters of the Irtis in cold Siberia; others form ever-murmuring forests of graceful bamboo on the banks of the Ganges. For the earth opposes every where to the encroaching tides of the ocean, another sea of restless vegetation, yielding constantly, and yet never giving way; with its green waves, so delicate, fragile and airy, and yet as strong in their very weakness as the deep-blue waves of the ocean. Further out at sea, enormous sponges fill vast spaces of the watery realm, and when mature break loose from their safe anchorage, to float in countless myriads through the surrounding sea. For here also nature pours out, with a lavish hand, living food, storing even the waves with nutriment for their gigantic denizens, and literally casting bread upon the waters for the living world of the ocean. In other zones, immense and permanent banks of verdure are met with, by far exceeding the largest prairies on land, true oceanic meadows. For twentythree long days did Columbus sail through one of these marvels of western waters, covering an area like that of all France; and yet there it is, even now, as large and as luxuriant as it was more than three centuries ago.

Trees and shrubs still gather around the desolate North Cape in spite of eternal winter, and relentless storms. Ice-clad Spitzbergen even boasts still of a willow, the giant of these Arctic forests, the woody stems of which, it is true, creep so close on the ground, and conceal themselves so anxiously in the turf bogs, that the small leaves, never rising more than an inch or two, are hardly discoverable amid the thick moss. The plains bordering on the Icy Sea are full of cryptogamous plants, and show even, here and there, patches of green turf, a most gladsome sight to the weary traveller. The swampy districts, also, which there extend further than eye can reach, are covered with a closely

woven carpet of mosses, minute in size, and yet so abundant, that they support immense herds of reindeer for a whole, 'dreary season. Even the perpetual snow of the polar regions is often adorned with beautiful forests of diminutive plants, and extensive fields of bright scarlet are seen, consisting of myriads of minute fungi and microscopic mushrooms, which form the so-called "gory dew." beheld by early navigators with a wonder nearly akin to awe. Capt. Richardson found the ground near the Arctic circle, though it remains frozen throughout the whole year to a depth of twenty inches, covered with bright flowering plants; and the great Humboldt saw at a height of more than 18,000 feet, on the uncovered rocks of the Chimborazo, traces of vegetation piercing through the eternal snow of those inhospitable regions. So far from ice and snow being hostile to plants, it has even been observed that some of the most beautiful flowers on earth grow in the very highest and bleakest parts of the Alps. There the snow has hardly melted, and lies still close at hand, when these Alpine roses unfold their brilliant flowers, with a haste, as if they knew how costly were the moments of their short summer-time. They seem to devote their whole strength to the development of their flowers, and as their stems are but short and partially buried in the ground, their bright blossoms often appear to spring immediately from the unsightly drift and gravel, in which they live. Thus bare steep cliffs, vast dazzling snow fields, and dark-blue glaciers, are seen in immediate contact with graceful little plants, decked with a profusion of flowers of the purest and brightest colors. The tiny forget-me-not of the Alps blossoms by the side of huge boulders of rock, and sweet roses unfold their rich crowns at the foot of massive blocks of ice, exhibiting a beautiful picture of loveliness mated with grandeur.

The vegetable kingdom extends its colonies even into the bowels of the earth -the so-called subterranean flora is large and beautiful. Wherever rain or surface water can percolate, either through natural cavities or openings made by the hand of man, there plants will appear, and busily hide the nakedness of the rock. Far below the soil on which we tread, plants thrive and adorn our globe. When the miner first opens his shaft, or the curious traveller discovers a new cave every where they find the rough rock and the snow-white stalactite covered with a delicate, graceful network of an usnea, or, as in the coal mines near Dresden, a lumi

nous fungus shines brightly, and turns these regions of darkness into the semblance of a begemmed and illuminated enchanter's palace. The narrow, deep crevices of the glaciers, have a vegetation of their own, and even in the thick-ribbed ice of the Antarctic seas, marine plants have been found floating.

Heat deters plants as little as cold; the fiery furnace of volcanoes is tapestried with confervæ, and hot springs, whose breath is certain destruction to animal life, feed plants, and water the roots of others, which bear beautiful blossoms. There are springs in Louisiana, whose temperature is 1458, and yet not only mosses, but shrubs and trees are seen to bathe their roots in their boiling waters. In the Fumarole, or the fairy island of Ischia, near Naples, a sedge and a fern grow in the midst of ascending vapors, and in a soil so hot that it instantly burns the hand which attempts to touch their roots! Nay, in the very geysers of Iceland, which boil an egg in a few minutes, a small plant grows, blossoms, and reproduces itself annually.

If land and water abound thus with vegetable life, the realms of the air are not less well peopled, at least with germs and seeds of plants; they float upon every breeze, are wafted up and down the heavens, and round and about our great mother carth. Nothing is more startling, more wonderful, than the almost omnipresence of fungus germs in the atmosphere. A morsel of ripe fruit, a little water spilt on a crumb of bread, a drop of stale ink, a neglected bottle of medicine, afford at once ample evidence of this teeming, living world around us. In a very short time, a delicate, velvet-like covering, envelopes the decomposing mass, and presently acquires the utmost luxuriance of growth. And a wonderful race are these fungi, the earth's vegetable scavengers; called upon, by the mysterious distribution of duties in nature, to destroy all decaying matter, and to absorb noisome exhalations, they grow with a rapidity that outstrips decay itself. A very common kind of puff-ball swells, in one night, from a minute speck to the size of a gourd, and there is a fungus at home, on the continent of Europe, which has been known to increase from a point invisible to the naked eye, to a weight of more than a hundred pounds! Or take the simple mould of every day's life. Arm your eye, and you will behold myriads of delicate forms, standing up in jaunty attitudes, and rearing their tender filaments over the decaying mass, in which they are living in lux

urious plenty. They lengthen, they swell, they burst, and again scatter their light and invisible germs, like a cloud of smoke, into the air. There they float around us, like motes in the sunbeam; there we breathe them, for they have been found in the membranes of the lungs of living men. Our common house-fly may be seen in fall, glued by cold and inertion to the window-pane, and at once covered with its own appropriate mould; in the West Indies, wasps have been observed flying about with plants of their own length hanging down from behind their heads. It is a fungus, the germs of which was introduced through the breathing pores into the body of the poor victim, where it takes root, and feeding upon the living substance, developes its luxuriant vegetation.

Heat and moisture are the two great requisites of plants: without them no vegetation is possible-heat, especially, is of all their necessaries of life the most important: it is the iron sceptre which rules the vegetable kingdom, whether the plant hangs in the air, is half buried in the ground, or for a lifetime covered with water. The same degree of heat produces every where the same union of kindred plants; hence the arrangement of all vegetables according to zones on our globe. The Arctic, nearest to the poles where the lichens still support the reindeer, and cheerful mosses cover the bare rock, is destitute of trees,-but it has dwarfish perennial plants, with large flowers of beautiful colors; it has its gentle smiling meadows and green pastures, which we miss so sadly in the sunny South. More varied and of higher order is the flora of the temperate zone, though not approaching in luxurious abundance and gorgeous brilliancy the splendor of the torrid zone. But what can compensate for the periodical, anxiously awaited, reawakening of nature, at the first breath of the mild air of spring? What is more beautiful than the fresh evergreen foliage of firs and cypresses, so rare in the tropics, which cheer up the desolate winter landscape, and loudly tell the nations of the North, that, though snow and ice cover the earth, the inward life of plants is never extinguished, and that spring will come after winter as surely as eternity comes after death? The great leading features of the temperate zone are its vast plains and steppes, which the eye of man cannot compass, and where he feels himself, as on the high sea, face to face with his Maker. These large prairies, or savannahs, are covered with luxuriant. waving grass, ex

pressive of all that is cheerful in their airy grace and tremulous lightness. In other regions, strange, fantastic-looking soda plants, succulent and evergreen, strike the eye and dazzle it with their brilliant, snow-white crystals-or, as on Russian steppes, plants of all kinds are so densely crowded on the unmeasured plain, that the wheels of the traveller's carriage can but with difficulty crush them, and he himself is half buried in the close, high forest of grapes, too tall to allow him to look around.

In the torrid zone all vegetable life attains the highest development, from the exclusive and constant union of a high temperature with abundant moisture. Here we find the greatest size combined with the greatest variety, the most graceful proportions by the side of the most grotesque forms, decked with every possible combination of brilliant coloring. Here also and here alone-are found truly primeval forests, impenetrable to man and beast, from the luxuriance of thickly interwoven creepers above and the density of a ligneous undergrowth, through which not a ray of light can penetrate.

As the distribution of plants in zones depends almost exclusively on the amount of heat which they require for their development, we find that the succession of plants from the foot of mountains upwards to their summit, is nearly the same as that from the middle latitudes to the poles. For heat decreases in the same proportion by height above the level of the sea as by latitude; and the horizontal zones on a mountain's side present the same variety of plants, as the great zones mentioned, only in a much smaller space; as we feel the temperature of the atmosphere diminish more rapidly in ascending a lofty mountain, than in travelling from the tropics to the poles. Hence the same peculiar plants are found in the arctic zone, and on the highest mountains which reach the line of perpetual snow; the same humble but no less beautiful flowers blossom in Spitzbergen and on the icy shores of Victoria Land, as on the desolate cliffs of the Andes, the Alps and the snow-covered heights of the Himalaya. Even under

the tropics, the evergreens of the North appear again: the most elevated regions of Peru, and the lofty plains of Asiatic mountains are covered with superb forests of that noble tree of which the poet says:

"Where summer smiles with verdure crown'd,
Where winter flings his storms, the pine is found;
With heaven aspiring head it grows
'Mid burning sun-and overlasting snows."

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On the highlands of Mexico, and the mountains of Java, the traveller from the cold North meets with surprise the chestnut and the noble oak of his own distant home. It is one of the most interesting enjoyments offered to the layman as well as to the botanist, thus to pass from zone to zone in the course of a few hours or

days at most. Rising, for instance, from the blue waters of the Mediterranean, his eye dwells at first with wondering delight on perfumed orange gardens and dusky olive-trees, "fair and of goodly fruit;" he passes through thickets of fragrant myrtle, laurel, and evergreen oaks, above which tower the stone-pines of the South, and here and there an isolated date palm, lifting up its gently-waving crown. A few steps further, and the aspect changes; he has left the evergreens of the milder climate behind him, and stepping out of the glowing, fiery sunshine, he delights in the cool, refreshing gloom of the wide branches of lofty chestnuts and proud oaks, the very kings of the forest. Revived by their luxuriant foliage, "at dewy eve distilling odors," he gazes upwards, where their branches interlace and form grand cathedral aisles, and bows down in awe and reverence in this fit temple of the Most High. As he ascends he meets yet with the maple, spreading out its broad dome of dark green leaves in masses so thick, that beneath it he fears not the passing shower, and the beech, which shows its dappled bark and bright green foliage. The silvery trunk of some white birch, with "boughs so pendulous and fair"begins already to gleam among the underwood, when he leaves behind him the aspen with its ever-quivering leaves, which almost shed a sense of breezy coolness through the sultry day.

His next step leads him into the dark woods of truly northern trees: pines, firs and larches. Their dense shade fills his soul with sombre thoughts; the gentle murmuring of their boughs sounds to his ear like low complaint, and even the sweet aroma that perfumes the air, brings with it-ke knows not why-feelings of vague grief and sorrow. He gazes up with amazement at the tallest of the tall, worthy to be

'Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast of some tall admiral,'

Now, as he mounts still higher, trees grow fewer and fewer; low bushes stand scattered about, forlorn outposts of their happier brethren below; they also soon venture higher, and low but fragrant herbs alone remain to greet his eye and cheer him on

his way upward. At last he reaches the eternal snow, that knows no season and no change, and stands in unsullied purity, dazzling white, high in the clear blue ether. All traces of life are left behindhe stands there alone in the awful, silent solitude, alone in the presence of his Maker. Thus he has seen in rapid succession, and in a few short hours, what it would have cost him months to behold, had he travelled from the same Mediterranean northward to the frozen Ocean.

Still more striking is the sudden change in high northern regions. In the year of revolutions it was my good fortune to cross the lofty, snow-capped mountains which divide Sweden and Norway. On the south we left summer behind us; as we climbed up the steep ascent, misty autumn and cold winter seized us by turns. At last we stood on the very line that forms the water-shed between the two kingdoms, and parts the loving sisters. Huge boulders of dark granite lay scattered about in wild disorder, and gigantic blocks of ice rose in stern majesty before us. Beyond was Norway. As we turned round one of these awe-inspiring masses, behold! a sight met our eyes that froze the very blood in our veins. A vast table land, bare and silent, spread its horrors before us: it was strewn with the bones of hundreds of men, who lay there stiff and cold-not a feature marred"death had put on so slumber-like a form " -but unburied, uncoffined and unknown. They were the sad relics of a whole regiment of brave, blooming sons of Sweden, who had marched into Norway. It was a fierce, bleak day of winter, and as company after company defiled from the wellprotected south around the very rock, by which we stood, the cold blast from the pole froze their breath within them, and laid them, one by one, lifeless on the cold ground.

And yet, within a few hours' ride from this most melancholy scene, there lay spring and summer at our feet. We descended rapidly, from the eternal snow. through the treeless zones into the faint, fairy sheen of white birchwoods, and the dark shade of pine-forests, brightened up by the showy blossoms of the foxglove when all of a sudden the sweet odor of fresh-mown hay was wafted upward to greet us. A short hour more, and the almost magical change set us down in the midst of waving fields of ripened corn, and meadows adorned by cherry-trees, which bent under the weight of their luscious fruit, and luxuriantly-blooming roses.