with doubt, but at length with an assurance amounting to conviction.

Some of the ancients imagined vegetables to have souls' distinct from their bodies; and the priests of Siam extended to them even the principle of transmigration and immortality." Some have even regarded them as deities. The Egyptians worshipped the lotus, and a veneration for plants prevailed formerly in Peru. Virgil, in the height of poetical excursion, has given plants the power even to speak; a figure sufficiently extravagant; and yet it has had the honour of captivating no less poets than Tasso ', Ariosto, and Spenser ©.

There is only one species of the tamarind-tree; and that is a native, not only of Egypt, Arabia, and Hindostan, but of America. Of the Barringtonia, also, only one species has yet been discovered; and that is equally indigenous in China and Otaheite. These, and other instances, would seem, at first view, to confirm an opinion, generated by Linnæus, viz. :—that plants were originally created with a power of producing their own species only, without any admixture of kinds; and that they will continue so to procreate to the end of time. Subsequent experience, however, has proved, that the farina of one plant, fecundating the pystillum of another, produces varieties capable of procreating sons and daughters; as well as the different plants of which they were themselves composed. New plants, also, are created by engrafting. The bergamot citron, for instance, was produced by an Italian having accidentally engrafted a citron on the stock of a bergamot pear. From this plant is distilled the essence of bergamot.

Some animals have an analogous origin. Foxes will copulate with dogs; horses with asses; pheasants with turkeys; and the whole tribe of pigeons came originally from the stockdove. The cassican bears so great an affinity with the rollers, toucans, and orioles, that it is reasonable to suppose it to

have originally sprung from an union between some of those birds. The lama proceeded from the guanaco, with which it is still observed to herd: and though some suppose the domestic goat to be descended from the ibex, or the caucasan, Buffon is perhaps justified in believing, that all the goat genus proceeded originally from the wild goat and chamois antelope. Plants produce not only plants, but they are mothers, as it were, to innumerable insects; almost equally invisible to us as to them. Myriads live and die upon the small capacity of a rose leaf! In the flowers of thyme, St. Pierre, through a small microscope, noted what he calls flagons, from which seemed to flow ingots of liquid gold. But had he put a few leaves of the same plant into a glass of pure water, he would have beheld, within the short space of five days, in a single globule, millions of animalcules of infusion; darting, turning, and swimming with a celerity, animation, and velocity, that baffle both the eye and the judgment. Almost equal results may be observed in the infusions of barley, oats, wheat, pepper, and bay-leaves. At Batavia, if a glass of water is taken out of the canal, in a few hours a a mass of animated matter is seen moving in endless divisions and subdivisions, and with a most astonishing celerity.

The arctic raspberry is so diminutive a plant, that a phial, capable of holding only six ounces of alcohol, will contain not only its fruit and its leaves, but its branches. The smallest of birds in Europe is the golden-crested wren; the smallest in America is the humming-bird; while the most diminutive of all quadrupeds is the pigmy mouse of Siberia. But the number of these animals is comparatively small. The astonishing increase of insects is caused by the short period intervening between impregnation and parturition. In the human species, the period is nine months; and yet the power of progressive numbers is so great, that it has been calculated,

a

Barrow, Cochin China, 231, 4to.

b Clarke, Scandinavia, 459.

and with truth, that, at the distance of twenty generations, every man has not less than 1,048,576 ancestors; and at the end of forty generations, even the square of that number; viz. one million millions.

The fructification of plants is exceedingly curious. Among insects, one female is married to a multitude of males; among quadrupeds, polygamy chiefly predominates; but among plants, the polyandrian system prevails almost universally; one female having often more than twenty husbands, attended by two remarkable phenomena:-1st. That no plant, tree, shrub, or flower, has yet been discovered, in which the corolla has eleven males. The number eleven, indeed, seems to be totally unknown in botany. 2ndly. That, out of 11,500 species of plants, enumerated in the first thirteen classes of the Cambridge collection, there is not a single hermaphrodite plant, in which the females exceed the males. The females of some flowers depend upon the wind, others upon insects, for their impregnation; since the pollen of the male is wafted to the stigmata on the wings, the thorax, the abdomen, the proboscis, or the antennæ of those flies, wasps, bees, and other insects, that rob them of their nectar.

But some plants, even of the most general classes, produce seeds without receiving pollen from the male. Hens, in the same manner, lay eggs without being visited by the cock: but seeds, thus formed, will never fructify; nor will eggs, thus laid, produce living animals. Some plants, too, grow upon other plants. The misseltoe rises out of the oak and the apple; and the mountain ash frequently springs from a berry, deposited by a bird in the chink of a yew-tree. The American loranthus climbs the Coccoloba grandiflora, and other high trees, in Jamaica, Hayti, Martinico, and Barbadoes; and its roots, like ivy, fixing firmly to their bark, like other parasitical plants, they borrow nourishment from the trees to which they cling. There is a mushroom which grow a Blackstone's Comment. b. ii. ch. 14, p. 204.

on the upper extremities of the white pines of Canada; and in the forest of Geltsdalo, the Earl of Carlisle has an ash, an alder, and a mountain ash growing out of the same solid trunk.

Here, too, we may note some resemblance with the manners of birds and insects. The cuckoo lays its eggs in the nest of a hedge-sparrow; the long-eared owl lays its eggs in the old nest of a magpie; and the hornet-fly deposits hers in the cells of an humble bee. Some birds, as the American goat-sucker, make no nest at all; but drop their eggs, as many fishes shed their spawn, careless what becomes of them. Birds, however, are for the most part assiduous in their `parental duties. Some plants bear analogies even with these : the tamarind closes upon its fruit, when the sun has set, in order to preserve it from the dew; and in Ceylon and in Java there is a plant a remarkable for having a small vegetable bag attached to the base of its leaves. This bag is covered with a lid, which moves on a strong fibre, answering the purpose of a hinge. When dews rise, or rains descend, this lid opens; when the bag is saturated, the lid falls, and closes so tightly that no evaporation can take place. The moisture, thus imbibed, cherishes the seed, and is gradually absorbed into the body of the plant. Sharks permit their young ones to retreat, in times of danger, into their stomachs; and there are some land animals, also, that possess the power of resisting the action of the gastric juice.

Some flowers are even viviparous; but I know of none that bear even a distant relation to the toad; which impregnates the eggs of the female as they issue from her anus. The potatoe, on the other hand, claims a peculiarity, on behalf of vegetables, not unworthy of observation. It produces more abundantly' from a small portion of its fruit, than from the seed itself. There is nothing in animals associating with this. Some plants, too, have not even so much as a root.

The Nepenthes distillatoria. Voy. Cochin China, 189, 4to. Vid. Jacquin, Flora Austriaca, 73. 77.

The fucus natans and the conferva vagabundi, for instance, swim on the surface of the sea like a nautilus. They may, therefore, not inaptly be styled plants of passage. The former swims upon the grassy sea; and the latter among the estuaries of Carnarvon and Merioneth, and not unfrequently in Milford Haven. Some plants may, also, be propagated by being engrafted or inoculated. Thus by inoculating one tree with the buds of others, several fruits may be made to grow upon one tree. Engrafting is performed either by insinuating a bud or scion into the stock, into the rind, into the bark, between the rind and the bark, cr into the root itself.

In general economy, the internal structure of viviparous and oviparous animals are different; but in serpents the conformation of both is the same. In the leech there seems to be no passage, by which it can eject the blood it has taken into its body. It will remain clotted, but not putrified, for months; and little altered either in texture or consistence. It probably exudes by the medium of pores.

Insects have no bones:-their blood is not red:-their mouths open lengthwise:-they have no eyelids :-and their lungs open at their sides. They seem to have the capacity of hearing, but they have no ears. Lizards, also, exhibit remarkable phenomena. They are neither beast, fish, bird, serpent, nor insect; and yet, in some measure, they share the natures of them all. Some are viviparous, like beasts; as the Lophius piscatorius;-others oviparous, like birds: some shed spawn like fishes; some have teeth like serpents; and others none, like many insects.

Some plants bear fruit on the backs of their leaves: as spleenwort, maidenhair, fern, brake, pepper-grass, and many species of moss. After the same manner, the Lapland marmot, the spider, and the American scorpion, carry their young upon their backs, wherever they go, in case of alarm. The monoculus insect carries its young on its back even in the