senses, but distinctly felt and shown by the delicate instruments which modern science has invented for the purpose. This, however, would not explain the changes alluded to; they are on far too vast a scale to be ascribed to such local disturbances. Almost in every portion of our globe, movement may be observed; the land is either rising or sinking-certainly in slow, but constant motion. Geology teaches us, that this is not a whim of our mother Earth, but that, for long generations, the same change, the same mysterious motion has been going on. It is difficult, only, to observe it, because of its exceeding slowness, as we would in vain hope to mark the progress of the hour-hand in our watches, and yet, finally, see that it has moved. If man could ever, with one vast glance, take in the whole earth-if he could look back into past ages, and, with prophetic eye, gaze into the future, he would see the land of our vast continents heave and sink like the stormtossed sea-now rising in mountains, and then sinking and crumbling, in a short time afterwards to be washed back into the calm, impassive ocean. Some of these inexplicable changes have been observed for ages. The whole coast of Asia Minor, from Tyre to Alexandria, has been sinking since the days of Ancient Rome. Northern Russia, on the contrary, has risen as constantly out of the frozen sea, in which it has been buried since the days when it was the home of those gigantic mammoths that are now found there, encased and preserved in eternal ice, to feed with their flesh the hungry natives, and to furnish the world with the produce of strange, inexhaustible ivory mines. Not far from Naples, near Puzzuoli, there are parts of an ancient temple of the Egyptian god Serapis still standing,-three beautiful columns, especially, speak of its former splendor. At a considerable height, they present the curious sight of being wormeaten; and recent, careful researches leave no doubt, that the waters of the Mediterranean once covered them so Ligh as to bring their upper parts within reach of the sea-worms. Since then, the land has risen high; but, stranger still, they are, by a mysterious force, once more to be submerged. Already, the floor of the temple is again covered with water; and a century hence, new generations of molluscs may dwell in the same abandoned homes of their fathers, which are now beyond the reach of the

highest waves. An old Capuchin monk, who lives near by, is fond of telling visitors, how he, himself, in his youth, had gathered grapes in the vineyards of his convent, over which now fisherboats pass in deep water. Venice, also, the venerable city of the doges, sinks-year after year-more into the arms of their betrothed bride, as if to hide her shame and her disgrace in the bosom of the Adriatic. Already, in 1722, when the pavement of the beautiful place of S. Marco was taken up, the workmen found, at a considerable depth below, an ancient pavement, which was then far below water-mark. Now, the Adriatic has again encroached upon the twice-raised square; at high-water, magazines and churches are flooded, and if proper measures are not taken in time, serious injury must inevitably follow. Not far from there, at Zara, superb antique mosaics may be seen, in clear weather, under the water and, on the southern side of the island of Bragnitza, at calm sea, your boat glides over long rows of magnificent stone sarcophagi, far below the clear, transparent surface.

France also bears many an evidence of such changes in place. The unfortunate St. Louis embarked at the spacious port of Aigues Mortes for his ill-fated crusade; the place-a harbor no more-is now at a mile's distance from shore. Only in the last century, in 1752, an English ship stranded near La Rochelle, on an oyster-bank, and was abandoned. Now the wreck lies in the midst of a cultivated field, thirteen feet above sea, and around it the industrious inhabitants have gained over two thousand acres of fertile land in less than twenty-five years. England presents similar instances; thus, the bay at Hithe, in Kent, was formerly considered at excellent harbor; it is now, in spite of great pains and much labor bestowed on it, firm land and very good pasture for cattle.

These gradual and almost imperceptible changes of land have probably been most carefully observed in Sweden, where already, in the times of Celsius, the people believed that the water was slowly withdrawing from the land. The great geologist Buch has since proved that, north of the province of Scania, Sweden is rising at the rate of from three to five feet a century, whilst south of this line, it is sinking in proportion. Some villages in southern Scania are now three hundred feet nearer to the Baltic than they were in the days of

Linnæus, who measured the distance a hundred years ago. Historical evidence abounds as to this mysterious movement of a whole continent; the coasts of Norway and England bear, moreover, ample proof on their surface. Nearly six hundred feet above the actual level, long, clear lines of the former level may be seen, distinctly marked by horizontal layers of shells, not of extinct species, but such as are still found in the adjoining waters. As we go further South, the land seems to sink: all along the coast of Germany and Holland legends and traditions are found, speaking of lost cities and inundated provinces. The Germans have their songs of the great city of Iduna, in the Northern Sea, the bells of whose churches may still be heard, in dream-like knelling, on a quiet, calm Sabbath-day; and in Holland they tell of the steeples and towers that can be seen in clear weather, far down in the Zuyder Sea. Stern reality shows that these are not idle inventions; it is wellknown that great cities, large islands, and whole provinces have actually been engulfed, and in both countries man is even now incessantly at work to protect the sinking shore against the encroaching waves. In Greenland, the level changes so much, and the ocean intrudes so fast, that the Moravian settlers had more than once to move the poles to which they moored their boats, nearer inland. On the low, rocky islands around, and on the mainland itself, numberless ancient buildings have been submerged, and for ages the inhabitants have ventured no longer to build near the sea-coast.

For the sea also has its strange motions like the firm land-gentle, progressive oscillations which return at stated periods, or act with sudden force. In the South Sea, we are told, the bottom of the sea rises and sinks in regular alternation; the same occurs near the coast of Chili, teaching us by land and water, the inconstancy of the present order of things, and the changes to which, at great intervals, the outlines of our continents are probably subject. Truly He alone, who is our God, He changes not.

Thus, all is life and motion in the earth, on the earth and around it. What a source of incessant movement is even the sun alone! From the bottom of the ocean it raises high into the air the rivers that are to water the two worlds. The sun orders the winds to distribute

them over continents and islands, and these invisible children of the air carry them under a thousand capricious forms from land to land. They spread them across the sky in golden veils and purple hangings; they raise them into huge dark domes, threatening deluge and destruction. They pour them in tempestuous torrents upon high mountains; they let them drop gently upon the thirsty plains. Now they shape them in beautiful crystals of snow, and now shower down pearls of peerless beauty in clear, transparent dewdrops. However whimsical their service seems to be, each part of our globe receives, nevertheless, year by year, only its proper and good proportion. Each river fills its bed; each naiad her shell. And the winds themselves, what busy travellers are not they in their own great realm of the air! They blow where they list and we hear the sound thereof, but we cannot tell whence they come and whither they go. A merry life they lead, these sailors of the air. Now they chase golden clouds high up in the blue ether, and now they descend to rock in merry sport gigantic oaks and Northern fir-trees. As pleasant pastime they give life to wandering shadows, wake the slumbering echo and gather rich perfumes from the flowery meadow. To-day they bend down vast oceans of gracefully waving corn-fields; to-morrow they peep under the branches of trees to look for golden fruit, or they strip them of their leaves to show to man, through their bare arms, the blue heavens above. On sultry days they cool themselves in the floods of the ocean, and carry refreshing dew back to the parched land. Passing on their manifold errands, they trace their characters in a thousand ways on the liquid plains of the sea. Some scarcely wrinkle the placid surface, others furrow it deeply with azure waves, or toss it up in raging billows and cover their crests with white foam.

Such are evidences of motion in Inorganic Nature. If organic bodies travel faster and more visibly, they leave, on the other hand, fewer great marks behind them. Rocks, when they wander, remain themselves as milestones, by which we may count the distance from which they came. Men keep in sagas and myths a certain hold on the past, or erect, with their own hands, monuments of great events. But plants and animals consist, at best, only of perishing individuals, and have no power given them to speak

to future ages. What we know, therefore, of their wanderings is little, but even that little gives us such an insight into the inner life and motion of Nature, that it is well worth recording.

Plants have ever travelled most and furthest of all children of this earth. Much has been said and much has been written about poor flowers, these true and genuine children of their mother earth, coming directly out of her bosom, and ever busy to draw from the air of heaven food for their great parent. Often have they been pitied because they are chained to the soil, whilst their own shadow, as in mockery, dances around them and marks the passing hours of sunshine. Trees have been called the true symbols of that longing for heaven which is innate in man's soul. Bound

for life to one small spot on earth, they are represented as stretching out widely their broad branches, far beyond the reach of humble roots, trying to embrace the balmy air, to drink in the golden light of the sun, and to arrest the very clouds in their aerial flight.

But in reality plants travel far and fast. It is true, they perform their journeys mostly in the seed; but there is, perhaps, no earthly kind of locomotion which they do not employ for their purpose. Wind and water, the beasts of the field and the winged creatures of heaven; above all, Man himself—all have been pressed into their service, to carry them from sea to sea, and from shore to shore. Countless powers of Nature are incessantly at work to scatter the blessings of the vegetable world over the nations of the world. Almost one-fourth of all plants upon earth bear seeds that are provided with wings, parachutes, or other contrivances, by means of which they may be carried on the wings of the wind to distant regions. Every brook and every river, even a short-lived rain, carry a thousand plants to remote countries. The great ocean itself, on its mighty currents, bears fruits and nuts from island to island, and every coral reef in the South Sea is almost instantly covered with a rich, luxuriant vegetation.

New plants appear thus constantly, where they were formerly not found, whilst of the disappearance of vegetables there are but few isolated instances known. Thus, Egyptian monuments have in their quaint and well-preserved paintings, three kinds of sea-rose; only two of these are now met with in Egypt

or the adjoining countries; the third is not found there or anywhere over the wide world.

The most efficient agent employed by plants for their journeys is man himself. History and science both teach us that the heated air, which, coming from the poles and rushing to the equator, there falls in with the great life-artery of the globe, and in a constant, almost organic current follows the apparent course of the sun from east to west, gives us the direction in which all life and motion proceeds upon earth. This great movement, no doubt as old as the globe itself, and yet the last known to man, is still going on; and whilst history furnishes us with a vast number of well authenticated facts, the present day verifies and substantiates them more and more clearly. All good things, it has been truly said, come from the Orient.

Plants also seem to have their common home in the East, from whence they I have travelled and scattered in all directions, far and wide. We mean not to speak here of the first epoch in the history of the earth, when islands rose out of a vast chaotic ocean, covered with plants which thence spread over the globe, wandering from the equator to the poles, and from high mountains to humble valleys. We speak not of the days when palm-trees and ferns were buried under the eternal snows of northern seas. Of those grand movements we have as yet too little positive knowledge. But we can follow, in comparatively modern times, the migrations of some plants, step by step, and we always see them travel from the rising towards the setting sun. Coffee and tea, Sugar and cotton, bananas, and spice, all were first known in the far East, and have, from thence, slowly followed the apparent light to the West. Alexander the Great brought from his expeditions the broad bean and the cucumber to Greece, and flax and hemp are of Indian birth.

Most important, however, for the life of man, and therefore his most faithful companions in his own great journeys, are the grasses. It is these which mainly feed him and domestic animals. Tropical regions certainly produce the breadfruit, cocoanut and date, which support man spontaneously all the year round; but they are bound to and confined within small districts and cannot be transplanted. Providence, therefore, has endowed some grasses-and these the most essential to man—with greater flexibility of

structure, so that he may carry them with him wherever he wanders. He is, after all, not the master of creation; he cannot at will alter the natural distribution of vegetables, to suit his pleasure or to satisfy his wants. Hence he has been compelled to choose, all over the world, among the 4000 varieties of grasses which adorn our generous earth, some twenty kinds only, which will in one summer, in a few months, produce rich food, independent of the dry heat of the tropics and the rigid cold of the North. It is they which mark the periods in man's history; with them came everywhere civilization in the change from a wandering, pastoral life to the higher grade of permanent agriculture. Thus, the great phases of man's history are written also on the green pages of the vegetable world.

At a very early period already these cerealia must have come from the Eden of God into the fields of man. Their subsequent path may be distinctly traced from nation to nation, but the unfathomable antiquity of their first culture is clearly seen in the fact that, in spite of the most careful researches, the genuine natural home of the more important varieties has never been discovered. Their original source is wrapped in the same mystery which hides the first history of those domestic animals, that have accompanied man all over the globe since bis earliest migrations. They are, in in truth, homeless. After tracing them up through a few centuries, we reach traditions and myths only, which invariably point to the gods themselves as the first givers of these rich blessings. In India Brahma descended from heaven for that purpose, in Egypt Isis; Greece owed the gift to her Demeter, Rome to Ceres. The ancient Peruvians even had similar legends about the origin of maize, which the bold Spaniards, who invaded their ancient kingdom, found cultivated on sacred ground around the Incas' Temple of the Sun, at an elevation of 12,000 feet above the sea. The ripened grain was solemnly sacrificed to their god or distributed among the people who ascribed to it miraculous powers. But, setting these fables aside, both tradition and history point invariably to the East as the land from which these grasses first came. Myths even lose them on the high table-lands of Asia, where, it has been conjectured, a late and last rise of the land in distant ages, and a sudden elevation of mountains may have scat

tered them so, that they can no longer be found even in their original fatherland. Now they are met with only cultivated or run wild, and even ancient Sanscrit has no proper word for them, but calls wheat already food of "barians, thus indicating its Northwestern origin.

Not all nations, however, can lay equal claim to the distribution of these noble gifts of nature. It is the Caucasian races alone who have caused the migrations of the most important plants from their original home, wherever that may be, to the four quarters of the globe. Europeans have, by degrees, transplanted to their own land all the characteristic plants of other races. They have fetched the finer fruits, the almond, apricot and peach, from Persia and Asia Minor; they have brought the orange from China, transplanted rice and cotton to the shores of the Mediterranean and carried maize and potatoes from America to Europe. But the influence of these races in changing the natural distribution of plants is even more evident in the colonies which they have established abroad. These they have endowed not only with their own vegetables, but also with those which would not flourish in Europe, but might thrive in more favored regions. Thus we find all European corn-plants in every part of America; the vine has been carrried to Madeira and the Canaries, to the southern parts of Africa and America; rice and cotton are raised in vast quantities in the United States and in Brazil; nutmeg and clove have found their way to Mauritius, Bourbon and the West India Islands, and tea is now cultivated in Brazil, India and Java. Other races have done but little; the Arabs helped to diffuse cotton, which the ancients already knew in India, and later in Egypt; coffee, sugar and the datepalm; the Chinese have imported cotton from Hindostan, and the Japanese tea from China.

The earliest grains known in Europe were undoubtedly wheat and barley, although even the oldest authors are at variance as to their first home. Charred grains of both are found in Pompeii, and pictures on the walls of the silent city show quails picking grains out of a spike of barley. The Bible, Homer, and Herodotus, already mention them as widely diffused, and Diodorus Siculus even speaks of the belief entertained by many, that wheat grew wild in the Leontine fields and several other places

in Sicily. So certain is it that antiquity itself was at a loss where to fix the original abode of these grasses; all references, however, point to India, and yet Humboldt tells us, that the varieties there found in our day bear unnistakable evidence that they were once cultivated, and have but recently become outcasts. The Spaniards carried wheat to North America; a negro slave of the great Cortes was the first who cultivated it in New Spain, beginning with three grains which he had accidentally found among the rice brought out as provisions for the army. At Quito, they show to this day, in a Franciscan convent, the earthen vessel which had contained the first wheat sown there by a monk, a native of Flanders, in front of his convent, after cutting down the original forest. The great Humboldt says justly, in connection with this fact: Would that the names had been preserved, not of those who made the earth desolate by bloody conquests, but of those who intrusted to it first these, its fruits, so early associated with the civilization of mankind. Barley, which Homer mentions as the food of his heroes' horses, has at least this merit, that it is the most widely spread of allthe nutritious grasses. It is known from the utmost boundary of culture in Lapland down to the elevated plains near the equator.

At a much later period, rye was brought to Europe; at the time of Galenus it found its way through Thracia into Greece, and Pliny speaks of it as having been brought from Tauria by Massilian merchants; in his day it was occasionally met with in the neighborhood of Turin. Serbian Wendes brought it in the seventh century to Germany, where Charlemagne at once distinguished its great importance, and wisely encouraged its culture, so that it soon spread over the continent, and now sustains at least one-third of its inhabitants. This grass also was apparently found growing wild in the Caucasus, but more careful observations have since shown that the presumed originals were a different species: their stems were so brittle that they could not be threshed. More recently still, oats were brought to Europe from the East, and whilst in Greece they were only used as green fodder, Pliny already represents the Germans as living upon eat groats, a dainty which they have by no means abandoned since.

Rice seems at a very early period of European history to have acquired no

small importance among the more widely diffused grasses. Hence we can more easily follow its gradual migrations from its home in India, to which, even the Sanscrit name Vri points, and where the Danish missionary, Klein, believes that he found it growing wild, to various parts of the world. In the East, we know, it was from the times of antiquity the principal article of food; at the time of Alexander the Great it was cultivated as far as the lower Euphrates, and from thence it was carried to Egypt. The Romans do not seem to have known it. The Arabs, however, brought it after their great conquests in Africa, Sicily, and Spain to Southern Europe. North America knows it only since the beginning of the last century, but produces now a large proportion of all the rice consumed in the Old World.

They

The New World claims maize alone as its own indigenous product among the nutritious grasses. But even this is not allowed without some opposition. Theophrastus speaks of a certain, peculiar wheat with grains of the size of an olive kernel, which came from India; and many believe that this cannot have been anything else but maize. try to strengthen their position by the fact, that not one of the many carefully searching travellers in America, has ever yet found maize growing otherwise than cultivated or evidently run wild. names in European languages certainly refer it to the East. Germany and Italy call it “Turkish wheat,” and the Greeks also point with their "Arabic wheat," to an Oriental home.

Its

It is almost cruel not to allow this continent the merit of being, at least, the original home of the potato, as is generally believed. It was said to grow wild in Peru, Chili, and Mexico, but learned botanists and careful observers have since ascertained that the tuber there found is not the common parent, but only a different species of the numerous genus to which the potato belongs. Another curious evidence is, that in Mexico itself, only quite recently attempts have been made along the coast to raise potatoes, mainly for the purpose of giving to Europeans in the socalled home of that most useful plant, the favorite vegetable of their own mother country. But alas! they have stoutly refused to grow any longer in the presumed land of their fathers, and every effort has so far signally failed.

As every great good has its necessary