another feature of justice to the scene; in all time, travesty has been the argument of oppression; and, in all time, the oppressed might have made this answer: "If I am vile, is it not your system that has made me so?" This ghastly laughter gives occasion, moreover, for the one strain of tenderness running through the web of this unpleasant story: the love of the blind girl, Dea, for the monster. It is a most benignant providence that thus harmoniously brings together these two misfortunes; it is one of these compensations, one of these afterthoughts of a relenting destiny, that reconcile us from time to time to the evil that is in the world; the atmosphere of the book is purified by the presence of this pathetic love; it seems to be above the story somehow, and not of it, as the full moon over the night of some foul and feverish city. There is here a quality in the narration more intimate and particular than is general with Hugo; but it must be owned, on the other hand, that the book is wordy and even, now and then, a little wearisome. Ursus and his wolf are pleasant enough companions; but the former is nearly as much an abstract type as the latter. There is a beginning, also, of an abuse of conventional conversation, such as may be quite pardonable in the drama, where needs must, but is without excuse in the romance. Lastly, I suppose one must say a word or two about the weak points of this not immaculate novel; and if so, it will be best to distinguish at once. The large family of English blunders, to which we have alluded already in speaking of "Les Travailleurs," are of a sort that is really indifferent in art. If Shakespeare makes his ships cast anchor by some seaport of Bohemia, if Hugo imagines Tom-Jim-Jack to be a likely nickname for an English sailor, or if either Shakespeare, or Hugo, or Scott, for that matter, be guilty of "figments enough to confuse the march of a whole history — anachronisms enough to overset all chronology," the life of their creations, the artistic truth and accuracy of their work, is not so much as compromised. But when we come upon a passage like the sinking of the Ourque in this romance, we can do nothing but cover our face with our hands the conscientious reader feels a sort of disgrace in the very reading. For such artistic falsehoods, springing from what I have called already an unprincipled avidity after effect, no amount of blame can be exaggerated; and above all, when the criminal is such a man as Victor Hugo. We cannot forgive in him what we might have passed over in a third-rate sensation novelist. Little as he seems to know of the sea and nautical affairs, he must have known very well that vessels do not go down as he makes the Ourque go down; he must have known that such a liberty with fact was against the laws of the game, and incompatible with all appearance of sincerity in conception or workmanship. In each of these books, one after another, there has been some departure from the traditional canons of romance; but taking each separately, one would have feared to make too much of these departures, or to found any theory upon what was perhaps purely accidental. The appearance of" Quatre Vingt Treize" has put us out of the region of such doubt. Like a doctor who has long been hesitating how to classify an epidemic malady, we have come at last upon a case so well marked that our uncertainty is at an end. It is a novel built upon "a sort of enigma," which was at that date laid before revolutionary France, and which is presented by Hugo to Tellmarch, to Lantenac, to Gauvain, and very terribly to Cimourdain, each of whom gives his own solution of the question, clement or stern, according to the temper of his spirit. That enigma was this: "Can a good action be a bad action? Does not he who spares the wolf kill the sheep?" This question, as I say, meets with one answer after another during the course of the book, and yet seems to remain undecided to the end. And something in the same way, although one character, or one set of characters, after another comes to the front and occupies our attention for the moment, we never identify our interest with any of these temporary heroes, nor 1 Prefatory letter to Peveril of the Peak. regret them after they are withdrawn. We soon come to regard them somewhat as special cases of a general law; what we really care for is something that they only imply and body forth to us. We know how history continues through century after century; how this king or that patriot disappears from its pages with his whole generation, and yet we do not cease to read, nor do we even feel as if we had reached any legitimate conclusion, because our interest is not in the men, but in the country that they loved or hated, benefited or injured. And so it is here: Gauvain and Cimourdain pass away, and we regard them no more than the lost armies of which we find the cold statistics in military annals; what we regard is what remains behind; it is the principle that put these men where they were, that filled them for a while with heroic inspiration, and has the power, now that they are fallen, to inspire others with the same courage. The interest of the novel centres about revolutionary France: just as the plot is an abstract judicial difficulty, the hero is an abstract historical force. And this has been done, not, as it would have been before, by the cold and cumbersome machinery of allegory, but with bold, straightforward realism, dealing only with the objective materials of art, but dealing with them so masterfully that the palest abstractions of thought come before us, and move our hopes and fears, as if they were the young men and maidens of customary romance. The episode of the mother and children in " Quatre Vingt Treize" is equal to anything that Hugo has ever written. There is one chapter in the second volume, for instance, called "Sein guéri, cœur saignant," that is full of the very stuff of true tragedy, and nothing could be more delightful than the humors of the three children on the day before the assault. The passage on La Vendée is really great, and the scenes in Paris have much of the same broad merit. The book is full, as usual, of pregnant and splendid sayings. But when thus much is conceded by way of praise, we come to the other scale of the balance, and find this, also, somewhat heavy. There is here a yet greater over-employment of conventional dialogue than in "L'Homme qui Rit;" and much that should have been said by the author himself, if it were to be said at all, he has most unwarrantably put into the mouths of one or other of his characters. We should like to know what becomes of the main body of the troop in the wood of La Saudraie during the thirty pages or so in which the foreguard lays aside all discipline, and stops to gossip over a woman and some children. We have an unpleasant idea forced upon us at one place, in spite of all the goodnatured incredulity that we can summon up to resist it. Is it possible that Monsieur Hugo thinks they ceased to steer the corvette while the gun was loose? Of the chapter in which Lantenac and Halmalho are alone together in the boat, the less said the better; of course, if there were nothing else, they would have been swamped thirty times over during the course of Lantenac's harangue. Again, after Lantenac has landed, we have scenes of almost inimitable workmanship that suggest the epithet" statuesque by their clear and trenchant outline; but the tocsin scene will not do, and the tocsin unfortunately pervades the whole passage, ringing continually in our ears with a taunting accusation of falsehood. And then, when we come to the place where Lantenac meets the royalists, under the idea that he is going to meet the republicans, it seems as if there were a hitch in the stage mechanism. I have tried it over in every way, and I cannot conceive any disposition that would make the scene possible as narrated. Such then, with their faults and their signal excellences, are the five great novels. Romance is a language in which many persons learn to speak with a certain appearance of fluency; but there are few who can ever bend it to any practical need, few who can ever be said to express themselves in it. It has become abundantly plain in the foregoing examination that Victor Hugo occupies a high place among those few. He has always a perfect command over his stories; and we see that they are constructed with a high regard to some ulterior purpose, and that every situation is informed with moral significance and grandeur. Of no other man can the same thing be said in the same degree. His romances are not to be confused with "the novel with a purpose," as familiar to the English reader; this is generally the model of incompetence; and we see the moral clumsily forced into every hole and corner of the story, or thrown externally over it like a carpet over a railing. Now the moral significance, with Hugo, is of the essence of the romance; it is the organizing principle. If you could somehow despoil "Les Misérables" or "Les Travailleurs" of their distinctive lesson, you would find that the story had lost its interest and the book was dead. Having thus learned to subordinate his story to an idea, to make his art speak, he went on to teach it to say things heretofore unaccustomed. If you look back at the five books of which we have now so hastily spoken, you will be astonished at the freedom with which the original purposes of story-telling have been laid aside and passed by. Where are now the two lovers who descended the main water-shed of all the Waverley novels, and all the novels that have tried to follow in their wake? Sometimes they are almost lost sight of before the solemn isolation of a man against the sea and sky, as in "Les Travailleurs ; sometimes, as in "Les Misérables," they merely figure for a while, as a beautiful episode in the epic of oppression; sometimes they are entirely absent, as in "Quatre Vingt Treize." There is no hero in "Notre Dame:" in "Les Misérables" it is an old man in "L' Homme qui Rit" it is a monster: in" Quatre Vingt Treize" it is the Revolution. Those elements that only began to show themselves timidly, as adjuncts, in the novels of Walter Scott, have usurped ever more and more of the canvas; until we find the whole interest of one of Hugo's romances centring around matter that Fielding would have banished from his altogether, as being out of the field of fiction. So we have elemental forces occupying nearly as large a place, playing (so to speak) nearly as important a rôle, as the man, Gilliat, who opposes and overcomes them. So we find the fortunes of a nation put upon the stage with as much vividness as ever before the fortunes of a village maiden or a lost heir; and the forces that oppose and corrupt a principle holding the attention quite as strongly as the wicked barons or dishonest attorneys of the past. Hence those individual interests that were supreme in Fielding, and even in Scott stood out over everything else and formed as it were the spine of the story, figure here only as one set of interests among many sets, one force among many forces, one thing to be treated out of a whole world of things equally vivid and important. So that, for Hugo, man is no longer an isolated spirit without antecedent or relation here below, but a being involved in the action and reaction of natural forces, himself a centre of such action and reaction; or an unit in a great multitude, chased hither and thither by epidemic terrors and aspirations, and, in all seriousness, blown about by every wind of doctrine. This is a long way that we have travelled: between such work and the work of Fielding is there not, indeed, a great gulf in thought and sentiment? Art, thus conceived, realizes for men a larger portion of life, and that portion one that it is more difficult for them to realize unaided; and, besides helping them to feel more intensely those restricted personal interests which are patent to all, it awakes in them some consciousness of those more general relations that are so strangely invisible to the average man in ordinary moods. It helps to keep man in his place in nature, and, above all, it helps him to understand more intelligently the responsibilities of his place in society. And in all this generalization of interest, we never miss those small humanities that are at the opposite pole of excellence in art; and while we admire the intellect that could see life thus largely, we are touched with another sentiment for the tender heart that slipped the piece of gold into Cosette's sabot, that was virginally troubled at the fluttering of her dress in the spring wind, or put the blind girl beside the deformity of the laughing man. This, then, is the last praise that we can award to these romances. The author has shown a power of just subordination hitherto unequalled; and as, in reaching forward to one class of effects, he has not been forgetful or careless of the other, his work is more nearly complete work, and his art, with all his imperfections, deals more comprehensively with the materials of life than that of any of his otherwise more sure and masterly predecessors. These five books would have made a very great fame for any writer, and yet they are but one façade of the splendid monument that Victor Hugo has erected to his own genius. Everywhere we find somewhat the same greatness, somewhat the same infirmities. In his poems and plays there are the same unaccountable protervities that have already astonished us in the romances. There, too, is the same feverish strength, welding the fiery iron of his idea under forge-hammer repetitions; an emphasis that is somehow akin to weakness; a strength that is a little epileptic. He stands so far above all his contemporaries, and so incomparably excels them in richness, breadth, variety, and moral earnestness, that we almost feel as if he had a sort of right to fall oftener and more heavily than others; but this does not reconcile us to see him profit by the privilege so freely. We like to have, in our great men, something that is above question; we like to place an implicit faith in them and see them always on the platform of their greatness: and this, unhappily, cannot be with Hugo. As Heine said long ago, his is a genius somewhat deformed; but, deformed as it is, we accept it gladly; we shall have the wisdom to see where his foot slips, but we shall have the justice also to recognize in him the greatest artist of our generation, and, in many ways, one of the greatest artists of all time. If we look back, yet once, upon these five romances, we see blemishes such as we can lay to the charge of no other man in the number of the famous; but to what other man can we attribute such sweeping innovations, such a new and significant view of life and man, such an amount, if we think of the amount merely, of equally consummate performance? THE GROUPING OF PLANTS. BY H. EVERSHED. SOME botanists are of opinion that the Arctic Circle where Hyperboreans breathed feathers in a credulous age, and where snow-flakes fill the air sometimes at the present day was the cradle of plants, as well as the birthplace of winds, and that the Alpines are the oldest of vegetables and first-born of Flora; that is, of the living Flora, for there is a dead Flora in the coal measures, of unknown origin, though of well-known fate, from whose ashes new plant-life springs. "Nothing in this world is single; The Alpines, growing round Upsal and about the house of the great botanist, were the group of plants that Linnæus first explored; and he always wrote lovingly of them, as if they had breath as well as beauty, speaking of them as those "numerous tribes in Sweden." He calls the algæ and lichens" the last of the vegetables, living on the confines of the earth." And as he climbed North Cape on the very edge of Europe, he saw the last of the lichens (Parmelia saxatilis) sticking like a patch on a rock which crowns that mountain mass in the feather district. Long since Linnæus wrote his "Tour in Lapland" Professor Charles Martins of Montpelier visited the humble tribes of Alpine plants on the shores of the North Sea, and observed the dogwood of Sweden (Cornus alba), the snowy gentian, and others, on the path that leads up North Cape; and climbing ladders, as Linnæus had done before him, to see what flowers were blossoming round the chimneys on the turf-roofs of Hammerfest (70° 48′ N. lat.) he found the ubiquitous shepherd's-purse, a chrysanthemum, a lychnis, and many primitive plants which are scattered over the heights of Europe, from the tops of the Grampian Hills to the Pyrenees and Alps. It has been said that they were left on their present sites by the congealed but moving waves of the glacial sea that once covered Europe, the plains of the Arctic regions having been the original centre of distribution of this kind of plants. There is perhaps no reason why one Alpine height should claim to be a birthplace of plants more than another, but a cradle theory is attractive and need not be disputed here. Dr. Daubeny sums up the evidence on this subject with the remark that "by a process of logical exhaustion we are driven to conclude that each species was originally introduced into a particular locality, from whence it diffused itself over a greater or lesser area, according to the amount of obstacles which checked its propagation and its own inherent power of surmounting them." The isolated groups of plants appear to have been gradually moulded into their present types by the pressure of surrounding circumstances, and thus new species were formed; and the cedars of Lebanon and of the Atlas may have both sprung from the Deodar of the Himalayan Mountains, which is supposed to be the typical form, being the most fixed in character and extending over the largest area with the least, variation. It must remain a matter of conjecture whether the Alpines originated on this point, or on that; or whether the peaks and plants now separated are parts of a continent and Flora that were once united. Professor Edward Forbes's theory of specific centres seems to us the most probable solution of a difficult problem, as opposed to Schouw's belief in many primary individuals of a species. The fact that a few plants are native both to North America and Europe, and to Europe and Australia, which are not found in intermediate countries, affords a glimpse of the startling movements of plants and changes of sea and land in former ages. Some plants must have spread far from their birthplace, wherever it was; others are less widely diffused. Our own irregular coasts, torn, it is supposed, from adjoining continents, exhibit a curiously broken Flora, whose general character is that of Central and Western Europe, tinged, however, with the sap - we can hardly say blood-of adjoining nations of plants. There are, 1st, a West Pyrenean Flora in the mountainous districts of the west and southwest of Ireland; 2d, an Armorican type on the southwest of England and southeast of Ireland, related to that of the Channel Islands and of Brittany and Normandy; 3d, the Flora of the southeast of England and the opposite coast of France; 4th, the Alpine or Scandinavian type of the Scotch, Welsh, and Cumberland mountains. The most probable explanation of these old but severed alliances is that the scattered links of vegetation were once united, till the bridges of the primeval world were broken and its communications destroyed by upheaval, or by submergence, which buried vegetation and left only the fossils to bear witness of the change. There is no spot in the world which contains so many distinct groups as the central portion of Eastern Africa, where the botanist finds plants typical of the Cape, Madagascar, the East Indies, Arabia, the north and west coasts of Africa, and, on the high mountains, the Alpines of Europe. The Alpines are the rats and mice of the vegetable world, ranging widely like those "small deer," while other plants resemble the reindeer and camel in the narrowness of their habitat. Byron said of the date-palm, — "It cannot quit its place of birth, It will not live in other earth." It flourishes in the burning sands of Africa and Syria, and is revered as the source of nutriment and raiment in districts where it forms the single link which binds human life to its desert home. The "palm dynasty" to which the date belongs, and the Soldanella, a lichen which vegetates at zero, while the cocoanut-tree does not stir under 68° Fahr., bound the plant world from the tropics to the Arctic Circle. There are very few cosmopolitan individuals in the vegetable kingdom, and plants, unlike animals, have very limited powers of acclimatizing; nor can they travel unless conveyed by ships, icebergs, birds, or currents of water, except in the case of cryptogamic tribes whose sporules are borne on the wings of the wind so easily that any spot on earth might be peopled with them. Grouping may be regarded as natural when the causes cannot be discovered, and nothing more occult than a mountain range, or other tangible obstacle, intervenes between two Floras. The continent of America is split laterally from north to south into two great plant kingdoms, by the barrier of the Rocky Mountains. There are lesser groups whose origin is quite unknown, or can only be inferred. The Flora of the East Indian islands is quite distinct from that of China, Japan, or Australia, while the little island of St. Helena has its own Flora distinct from that of the adjacent coast of Africa. There are three species of beech growing respectively in Tierra del Fuego, in Chili, and in Van Diemen's Land, each of which bears on its limbs a peculiar fungus. This is in the strictest sense a natural, not an accidental grouping, since Nature alone could have planted those fungi, and man's hand cannot transplant them. But as the firstnamed country is sterile, the tall Patagonians might be exterminated by any side wind which destroyed their beeches since they live almost entirely on the bright yellow, globular fungus (Cyttaria Darwinii) which grows in great abundance on the trees, and is the solitary instance of a cryptogamic plant affording the main support of a nation. Natural groups, like the crops of our fields, are fugitive. They may last as many years as our crops last hours perhaps, but the sickle of Time cuts them down at last and others replace them. A fern once covered immense tracts in New Zealand, and its root was largely eaten by the aborigines before they learned the art of culture and obtained the potato. It was believed that the fern had succeeded naturally to the primeval forests; its own removal has been effected by cultivation, and in some instances by the encroachments of the fast-spreading Scotch thistle. Change, not rigidity, is the order of Nature, and suitable sites become unsuitable by a variety of accidents as when the clearing of timber in the province of Caracas exposed the country to drying winds, which banished the plantations of cocoa-trees to the moist forests of the Upper Orinoco, and other wooded tracts. The coast of North America, for seventeen hundred miles, from Virginia to the Mississippi, is fringed with pine barrens 130 miles wide, and when the trees are cut down for the exportation of their inflammable products from the port of Wilmington, pines may spring again on the best of the bad soils; but in general the scrub oak is the succession plant. Towards the outfall of the river, where magnificent mixed forests of liquidamber, elm, ash, white and red oak, cherry, magnolia, mulberry, and wild grape have been felled, and the land scourged by corn and cotton, and then abandoned to Nature, the pine and scrub oak, trees of poor soils, have sprung up. But when the land was left unscourged the mixed forest again clothed the bare earth. It is 200 years since "Sylva" Evelyn planted the Wotton woods near Dorking with beech, the ground having been cleared of oak for that purpose. The woods are now magnificent, but in one exposed plantation a wreck of great beeches occurred a few years ago, when a gale followed a snow-storm that had laden their branches heavily, and we observed that birch immediately sprung up thickly on the levelled site, being the crop Nature had sown there at some former period. In like manner a sand-hill, whose surface of mould had been removed to the glorious gardens at Trentham, was soon gracefully clad with self-sown birch, the offspring of primeval forests. The unexpected springing up of plants which no mortal hand can have Sown suggests seedings and rotations longer and less known than that of Norfolk ! We shall proceed to notice other contrasts of vegetation as they occur to us, groups and rotations, rather than logical sequences, being our aim. De Candolle observes that plants resist extremes in in verse ratio to the quantity of water they contain; and in proportion to the vascidity of their fluids. They resist cold in inverse ratio to the rapidity with which their fluids circulate; they are liable to freeze in proportion to the size of the cells in which their fluids are contained, and the power of absorbing sap, by roots that are little exposed to the atmosphere, lessens the liability. Air, confined in the tissues, enables plants to resist extremes. The hardy character of the Scotch fir therefore may be explained by the fact that its resinous sap does not easily freeze; and dissection may reveal the immediate causes of climatic groupings, but it does not show why the heaths of the Cape are unable to thrive side by side with those of Jutland and the heath-tracts of Northern Germany. We do not propose to grapple with the unknown, but we may discourse a little of the doubtful, and ask how it was that nearly all the heaths, except five or six European species, were confined to the Cape, the epacrises so closely allied to them—to Australia, the orange to China, nearly all the passion flowers to the New World, and nearly all the roses to the Old. Why are "misery balls" found only in the Falkland Islands, in wet mountainous hollows where huge masses of vegetable matter are formed, partly by their own decay, so near together that the foliage meets above and excludes the sky, shutting in the traveller who ventures into the horrid bog? There are other miserable spots on earth; why cannot they boast their mounds of balsam-bog (Bolax glebaria) and hillocks of tussock grass? The isolation of particular plants gave rise to the ancient opinion that the gods created them at odd times, when they saw fit, as when Minerva planted the olive in the Mediterranean basin, or when the goddess of discovery presented mandrakes to Dioscorides, the ancient plant collector, who immediately noted them down in his list of new plants. The Hindoo deities had been busy long before those of Greece, and perhaps certain curiously isolated groups at the present day may have sprung from plantlings formerly left on their sites by capricious genii; and in many cases isolated plants would have remained forever, like shipwrecked mariners, on their desolate islands, but for the agency of that singular busybody who is constantly tampering with Nature by sea and by land, and removing landmarks and plant-boundaries. But there are constant changes in the vegetable world, necessary to its order and stability, and due to an innate power of organic adaptability which enables plants to survive the struggle for existence to which they are so often exposed, as in the case of the Rhododendron Dalhousiæ of Sikkim, which would have been lost in certain sites if it had not acquired the power of living, however poorly, on the trunks and limbs of trees in those parts of the humid and teeming forest which are too dense for undergrowth. Dr. Hooker observed that it grew far more luxuriantly wher some new road, or fall of timber, provided it with an open site where its seeds found soil to root in, and it was only in the thick forest that the little shrub became epiphytical and saved its life by rooting on the rough, wet, and mossgrown branches of the trees. It is probable that under stress of adverse circumstances it might so far change its habits as to lose the power of rooting in its mother earth; and on the other hand, if a specimen were removed to a more open part of the forest it might become the parent of species that retained no trace of parasitical char acter. Elasticity of organization insures the power of development and secures the wonderful variety in the forms of vegetation. We classify our knowledge of parts, organs, and forms under the term Morphology, which leads to the convenient arrangement of plants in classes, species, and genera; but the laws by which fundamental types and shapes were originated and have sometimes deviated into new forms, have not yet been unfolded. We cannot dissect out the disposition of plants or animals, or trace the causes of variation, correlation, and other phenomena of growth; but we can follow the operation of those causes, and avail ourselves of the results of that beneficence which endowed vegetables with a capability of progression, and enabled wild plants to establish themselves on their shifting sites, giving the oölite, the lias, the wealden, and all other formations their distinguishing Flora, and providing seeds for every site-seeds for shades and for sunny sites, and for damp places and dry. Introduced plants frequently eject their predecessors, and appear to benefit, as people often do, by a change of air, thriving in new and distant homes better than in their original habitats. The plants of Europe have in many cases driven off the vegetable tribes of America and Australia, and occupied their sites; and while the footsteps of the white man are sounding the death-knell of the aboriginal people, his plants are destroying those of the poor savage. There is no kingdom on earth so revolutionary as the vegetable kingdom. Plants may be said to live amidst strife and constant struggles, and to slay each other mercilessly, though without bloodshed or cruelty. The larger trees of the tropical forests are entwined and throttled by trailers, and hugged by lianas till they die; smaller plants seem to wait for the places filled by their stronger neighbors. There is less rivalry in European forests, only because a few sovereign species of timber trees, like the Scotch and spruce firs of Scandinavia, hold possession of the soil and do not allow the approach of rivals. The plants that feed the populations of the world have prevailed in the fields of nature and of cultivation by virtue of conquest, effected with or without the aid of man; and it is remarkable that the most useful plants are the most robust and elastic, such as the hardy grasses and those great wanderers the Graminacea, wheat, rice, maize, and millet, which have followed man in all his migrations. What a determination of physical character wheat, maize, the banana-tree, cassava, and others must possess, since they have pushed their way among their compeers, till they each dominate over wide surfaces of the globe, and their true or native country cannot now be determined! The grouping of plants and the constant testing of those inherent qualities which determine their fortunes, if we may use the expression, have been, and still are, largely influenced by the operation of the natural forces of earth and air. Ice, snow, and water, the trickling rill and the flood, the snowdrift and the storm, or the rasping and abrading glacier, are alike levellers and excavators and promoters of those changes in contour, climate, and vegetation whose records are read by the geologist, while the naturalist detects them in the groupings of plants. It is the "hand of Nature". a phrase which attractively indicates the source of so many natural phenomena - which has had the greatest share in clothing the earth with its characteristic vegetation. The part man has played in this great work has been comparatively limited in regard to both time and the object to be attained, and it has been confined to the dispersion of useful and ornamental plants, and the forming of botanical collections in gardens, or in the hortus siccus; the grander and primary design seems to have been that all the earth should become "with verdure clad." In conclusion, we add a brief description of the zones of vegetation, and a few examples of those interesting botanical divisions which record the labors of the botanists who have investigated the plants of particular localities: and first let us mention Linnæus's region in Northern Europe and Asia, including the Umbelliferæ and Cruciferæ, the carrot and turnip tribes, and the. fruits, cereals, pasture grasses, fodder plants, and trees which are found in connection with those esculents. De Candolle's region includes rice and millets, and the fruits and vegetation of the south, represented by the Labiata and Caryophylleæ. Kompfer's region includes China and Japan and the tea-plant, with gourds and melons, indigo, hemp, and cotton. Roxburgh's region is Indian and Tropical, and his pages smell of spices. There are twenty-five botanical regions which have been examined by as many eminent botanists, who have named 1 See Notes on North America, by Johnston; Lake Superior, by Agassiz ; and Dr. Hooker's papers in the Journal of the Horticultural Society. and described more than 100,000 species of plants, while Pliny could only enumerate 1000 species in his "Historia Naturalis." We pass on to notice the zones of vegetation which Humboldt sketched so charmingly in "Aspects of Nature," and which other travellers have labored at till the details of some portions of the botanical map have been filled in with tolerable completeness, and only such districts as the interior of Africa and the central portions of Asia and South America remain comparatively unexplored. The division just referred to consists of eight botanical zones or kingdoms, extending from the equator to the poles, with corresponding mountain regions extending from the equator upwards towards the cold air of the mountain-tops. Nature does not conform strictly to the arbitrary lines which have been laid down for the purpose of methodizing knowledge and of obtaining a framework to hold its fabric during the process of investigation. Her vegetable subjects often wander beyond the limits of the eight broad beltings, which should therefore be printed on the memory with overlapping edges; or, rather, should be imagined as blending the one with the other like the hues of the rainbow. They are as follows: The Horizontal Zones of Vegetation and corresponding Vertical Regions at the Equator : 1. The Equatorial Zone, 15° N. 15° S. lat. palms and bananas: reaching an altitude of Mean annual temperature 81° Fahr. Region of 1900 feet. 2. The Tropical Zone, from 15° to 23° of lat. Region of tree-ferns, figs, and pepper-plants: reaching from an altitude of 1900 feet at the equator to 3600 feet or 3800 feet. Mean annual temperature 74°. 3. The Sub-Tropical Zone, from 23° to 34° of lat. Region of myrtles, magnolias, and laurels: reaching from an altitude of 3800 feet at the equator to 5700 feet. Mean annual temperature 68°. 4. The Warmer Temperate Zone, from 34° to 45° of lat. Region of evergreen and leathery-leaved trees. The palms and aborescent grasses that were features of the scene in the tree warmer zones disappear; the forest-trees begin to appear, and the evergreen oaks, oleander, phillyreæ, laurustinus, strawberry-tree, and pomegranate of the Mediterranean basin; the evergreen gleditschiæ and climbing bignonia of the Ohio; the magnoliacea (tulip-trees, etc.) and leguminous trees (acacias, etc.), and gigantic reeds of America; the arborescent grasses of the Pampas plains of Buenos Ayres; the araucaria and beeches of Chili, with the Chilian palm as an outlier, like the dwarf palm of Southern Europe and the palmetto of North America: reaching from an altitude of 5700 feet to about 7600 feet. Mean annual temperature 63°. 5. The Cooler Temperate Zone, from 45° to 58° of lat. Region of deciduous trees, with social conifers, pasturegrasses, the honeysuckle, the ivy, and the hop (replacing the lianes of the tropics), and of mosses and lichens which feather the trunks and branches of trees instead of the orchids of the tropics. The shrubs are roses, brambles, viburnas, etc., which lose their leaves in winterthere is no cool zone in Africa: reaching from an altitude of 7600 feet to 9500 feet. Mean annual temperature 58°. 7. The Sub-Arctic (and Sub-Antarctic) Zone, from 58° of lat. to the Arctic (and Antarctic) Circle. Region of abietinæ (firs), of the birch and alder, of gay spring flowers and pastures: reaching from 9500 feet to 11,500 feet. Mean annual temperature 62°. 7. The Arctic (and Antarctic), Zone, from the Arctic (and Antarctic) Circle to 72° of lat. Region of prostrate Alpine shrubs and dwarfs: reaching from 11,400 to 13,300 feet. Mean annual temperature 43°. 8. The Polar Zone, above 72° of lat. Region of Alpine plants, saxifrages, ranunculi, potentillæ, and cryptogamic plants, from the upper line of bushes to that of perpetual Mean annual temperature 38°. snow. TYNDALL'S ADDRESS BEFORE THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION AT BELFAST (WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19, 1874). AN impulse inherent in primeval man turned his thoughts and questionings betimes towards the sources of natural phenomena. The same impulse, inherited and intensified, is the spur of scientific action to-day. Determined by it, by a process of abstraction from experience we form physical theories which lie beyond the pale of experience, but which satisfy the desire of the mind to see every natural occurrence resting upon a cause. In forming their notions of the origin of things, our earliest historic (and doubtless, we might add, our prehistoric) ancestors pursued, as far as their intelligence permitted, the same course. They also fell back upon experience, but with this difference that the particular experiences which furnished the weft and woof of their theories were drawn, not from the study of nature, but from what lay much closer to them, the observation of men. Their theories accordingly took an anthropomorphic form. To supersensual beings, which, "however potent and invisible, were nothing but a species of human creatures, perhaps raised from among mankind, and retaining all human passions and appetites," 1 were handed over the rule and governance of natural phe nomena. Tested by observation and reflection, these early notions failed in the long run to satisfy the more penetrating intellects of our race. Far in the depths of history we find men of exceptional power differentiating themselves from the crowd, rejecting these anthropomorphic notions, and seeking to connect natural phenomena with their physical principles. But long prior to these purer efforts of the understanding the merchant had been abroad, and rendered the philosopher possible; commerce had been developed, wealth amassed, leisure for travel and for speculation secured, while races educated under different conditions, and therefore differently informed and endowed, had been stimulated and sharpened by mutual contact. In those regions where the commercial aristocracy of ancient Greece mingled with its eastern neighbors, the sciences were born, being nurtured and developed by free-thinking and courageous men. The state of things to be displaced may be gathered from a passage of Euripides quoted by Hume: "There is nothing in the world; no glory, no prosperity. The gods toss all into confusion; mix everything with its reverse, that all of us, from our ignorance and uncertainty, may pay them the more worship and reverence." Now, as science demands the radical extirpation of caprice and the absolute reliance upon law in nature, there grew with the growth of scientific notions a desire and determination to sweep from the field of theory this mob of gods and demons, and to place natural phenomena on a basis more congruent with themselves. The problem which had been previously approached from above was now attacked from below; theoretic effort passed from the super to the sub sensible. It was felt that to construct the universe in idea it was necessary to have some notion of its constituent parts of what Lucretius subsequently called the "First Beginnings." Abstracting again from experience, the leaders of scientific speculation reached at length the pregnant doctrine of atoms and molecules, the latest developments of which were set forth with such power and clearness at the last meeting of the British Association. Thought no doubt had long hovered about this doctrine before it attained the precision and completeness which it assumed in the mind of Democritus, a philosopher who may well for a moment arexcellent "History of Materialism," a work to the spirit rest our attention. "Few great men," says Lange in his and letter of which I am equally indebted, "have been so despitefully used by history as Democritus. In the distions there remains of him almost nothing but the name of torted images sent down to us through unscientific tradithe laughing philosopher,' while figures of immeasurably 1 Hume, Natural History of Religion. |