plants the power even to speak; a figure sufficiently extravagant; and yet it has had the honour of captivating poets no less distinguished than Tasso', Ariosto, and Spenser2. 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 been yet 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 pystillam 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 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 analagous origin. Foxes will copulate with dogs; horses with asses; pheasants with turkies; and the whole tribe of pigeons came originally from the stock dove. The cassican bears so great an affinity with the rollers, toucans, and orioles, that it is reasonable to suppose it to have originally

Jer. Lib. xiii. st. 41.

2 Faerie Queene, c. ii. st. 30.

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 mo-thers, 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 baffles 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 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

1 Barrow, Cochin China, 231, 4to.

• Clarke, Scandinavia, 459.

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 numbers 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, 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.

IV.

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 almost universally prevails; 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. 2dly. 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 malès. The females of some flowers depend upon the wind, others upon insects,

'Blackstone's Comment. b. ii. ch. 14. p. 204.

for their impregnation; since the pollen of the male is wafted to the stigmatas on the wings, the thorax, the abdomen, the proboscis, or the antennæ of those flies, wasps, and bees, 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 grows 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 mark 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 humblebee. Some birds, as the American goat-sucker, make no nest at all; but drop their eggs, as many fishes shed

1 Jacquin. Flora Austriaca, 73, 77.

:

their spawn, careless what becomes of them. Birds, however, are for the most part assiduous in their paternal 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 grows a plant' 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 pur.pose 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 fucus natans and the conferva vagabundi swim on the surface of the sea like a nautilus. They may, therefore, not inaptly be styled plants of The Nepenthes distillatoria. Voy. Cochin China, 189, 4to.