| Elm | 335 | years. | |
| Cypress | about 350 | " | |
| Cheirostemon | 400 | " | |
| Ivy | 450 | " | |
| Larch | 576 | " | |
| Orange | 630 | " | |
| Olive | 700 | " | |
| Oriental Plane | 720 | " | and upwards. |
| Cedar of Lebanon | 800 | " | |
| Oak | 810, 1080, 1500 | " | |
| Lime | 1076, 1147 | " | |
| Yew | 1214, 1458, 2588, 2880 | " | |
| Taxodium | 4000 to 6000 | " | |
| Baobab | 5150 | " |
1215. Admitting, with Professor Henslow, that De Candolle overrated the ages of these trees one-third, they are examples of extraordinary longevity. Yew trees upwards of 700 years old remain at Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire, as there is historic evidence of their existence in the year 1133. But a yew in the churchyard of Darley-in-the-Dale, Derbyshire, is considered by Mr. Bowman as 2000 years old.
1216. The cryptogamous plants afford the most numerous examples of wide diffusion. A lichen indigenous in Cornwall, sticta aurata, is also a native of the West India Islands, Brazil, St Helena, and the Cape of Good Hope; while 38 lichens and 28 mosses are common to Great Britain and Australia, though the general vegetation of the two districts is remarkably discordant. Some species of endogenous plants are also widely distributed, the Phleum alpinum of Switzerland occurring without the slightest difference at the Strait of Magellan, and the quaking grasses of Europe in the interior of Southern Africa. But only in very few instances are the same species of exogenous plants met with in regions far apart from each other; and generally speaking, in passing from one country to another, we encounter a new flora; for if the same genera occur, the species are not identical, while in districts widely separated the genera are different.
1217. The cryptogamic plants, mosses, lichens, ferns, and fungi, are to the whole mass of phænogamic vegetation in the following proportions in different districts: Equatorial latitudes, 0 deg. to 10 deg.; on the plains, 1-25th, on the mountains, 1-5th; mean latitudes, 45 deg. to 52 deg. ½; high latitudes, 67 deg. 70 deg., proportion about equal. Thus the proportion of the flowerless vegetation to the flowering increases from the equator to the poles. But the family of ferns, filices, viewed singly, forms an exception to this law, decreasing as we depart from equinoctial countries, being 1-20th in equatorial and 1-70th in mean latitudes, and not found at all in the high latitudes of the new world.
"To give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called Trees of righteousness, The planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified."—Isaiah lxi.
1218. In equinoctial and tropical countries, where a sufficient supply of moisture combines with the influence of light and heat, vegetation appears in all its magnitude and glory. Its lower orders, mosses, fungi, and confervæ, are very rare. The ferns are aborescent. Reeds ascend to the height of a hundred feet, and rigid grasses rise to forty. The forests are composed of majestic leafy evergreen trees bearing brilliant blossoms, their colours finely contrasting, scarcely any two standing together being of the same species. Enormous creepers climb their trunks; parasitical orchidæ hang in festoons from branch to branch, and augment the floral decoration with scarlet, purple, blue, rose, and golden dyes. Of plants used by man for food, or as luxuries, or for medicinal purposes, occurring in this region, rice, bananas, dates, cocoa, cacao, bread-fruit, coffee, tea, sugar, vanilla, Peruvian bark, pepper, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmegs, are either characteristic of it as principally cultivated within its limits, or entirely confined to them.
1219. Rice (Oryza-sativa), the chief food of, perhaps, a third of the human race, is cultivated beyond the tropics, but principally within them, only where there is a plentiful supply of water. It has never been found wild; its native country is unknown; but probably southern Asia.
1220. Bananas, or plantains (Musa sapientum et paradisiaca), are cultivated in intertropical Asia, Africa, and America. The latter species occur in Syria. The banana is not known in an uncultivated state. Its produce is enormous, estimated to be on the same space of ground to that of wheat, as 133 to 1, and to that of potatoes as 44 to 1.