[THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM.]
QUANTITY, DISTRIBUTION, AND OFFICES OF THE VEGETABLE.
In contemplating nature there are few things which give more delight than the beauty and variety of the vegetation which clothes the surface of the earth, whether it be that we contemplate the grassy covering of the plains of the Old World, or the immense "prairies" of the New, spreading out as it were into seas of grass, and giving food and shelter to thousands of wild animals; or gaze upon the rocky height of some vast mountain range, and see the gigantic oak or pine, forming by their wide-spread shades the solemn forest which extends for miles beneath us, and which forms a shelter for the various tribes of birds, monkeys, and other animals, to whom it is a home of happiness and plenty—under every aspect the contemplation of nature's clothing fills the mind with awe and admiration.
There is hardly anything more refreshing to the mind than the contemplation of trees and shrubs congregated into a wood, the floor of which is carpeted with mosses and flowers, where the gigantic and gnarled trunks of the forest trees covered with many-coloured lichens starting up all round, circumscribe the view, while the wide-spreading boughs and the leafy canopy overhead exclude the sun's rays. It is here that one views nature in her purest forms and colours, untouched by the destroying hand of artificial arrangement.
The immense preponderance of the vegetable over the animal world in quantity compensates somewhat for the superior organisation and the intelligence of the latter, which must be studied in the individual, while the vegetable world, which can be contemplated in the mass, almost overwhelms the imagination with its vastness. It is indeed impossible to compute the amount of vegetation in the great forests of America and Russia (in which latter country are the largest in the world), covering hundreds, nay thousands, of square miles with one continuous growth of timber. That forest in Russia through which the river Pechora flows, extends over a space of 150,000 square miles! The whole mass of animated existence sinks into insignificance when compared in quantity with this; and when to these forest-tracts are added the thousands of square miles of grass and heaths which grow in some climates with wonderful luxuriance, the amount of the vegetable kingdom is at once placed beyond all comparison with the animal kingdom in point of quantity. Cooper, in his American novels, describes the prairies as great seas of grass extending as far as the eye can reach, and rising to a height of 8 or 10 feet; and Humboldt describes some of the grasses on the plains of the Oronoco, as being so gigantic that they measure 18 feet from knot to knot, and says the Indians use them for blow-pipes to shoot their poisoned arrows from. And—as though it were not sufficient that the earth should bring forth everywhere all kinds of trees, shrubs, and grasses—the waters of the ocean itself are often filled with vegetable life; in some tracks the tangled sea-weed (Fucus Natans) is so dense as to impede the onward progress of ships for hundreds of miles together.
Humboldt, in his "Views of Nature," describing the two great banks of sea-weed, says: "The two banks of sea-weed, together with the transverse band uniting them, constitute the Sargasso Sea of the older writers, and collectively occupy an area equal to six or seven times that of Germany."
