but lakes and pools choked with vegetable matter, which remains in a half-consumed condition? The importance of vegetation, in the economy of nature, is thus as apparent in the humbler, as the more imposing plants. The means adopted to cover every part of the earth with these agents display the wisdom of Providence, in a remarkable degree, in making various objects the instruments of completing its designs. We might naturally be at a loss to know how vegetation found its way to places that originally had none, and that are not likely to have been visited by what would bring them. How, for instance, could the frozen soil of New Shetland, amid the ice-rocks of the Antarctic, obtain the lichens, the only vegetable found, or perhaps growable, upon it? How have the coral islands of the Pacific, formed in the bosom of the waves by the petty animalculæ that construct them, derived their fine cocoanut-trees and beautiful forests? How can the new volcanic island that has just emerged from the shallow bottom of the Sicilian Sea, ever acquire, as it will do, a productive vegetation? The answer is easily given. The clouds, ever floating above us, not only bring us occasionally meteoric stones, hail, and epidemics, but also vegetable seeds, and the very lichens that would commence the new reign of vegetation on the bleak rocks of the southpolar isles. Dust and sands, heavier than many seeds, are borne by the winds and clouds for several hundred miles across the atmosphere, falling on the earth and seas as they pass along. The cryptogamia, and many of the grassy seeds, are not more weighty than matter of this sort, which the aerial movement thus transports. The sea, and its tides and currents, convey larger bodies for even thousands of miles. The winds carry over the seeds of large trees, and disperse new vegetations with an extraordinary rapidity, and to an extent which, anterior to the experience, we should not have expected. Birds also largely diffuse them. Many of these tenants of the trees and air live on fruit and berries. They digest the pulp, but pass the seeds unimpaired; and thus heavy organizations of future trees are planted in the most distant and unexpected situations. The parasitical mistletoe, converted by the stern Druids of our British predecessors into an instrument of their governing superstition, and which they gathered from the tree on which it fed with such imposing solemnity, thus attains its lofty, and, in the days of ignorance, mysterious situation. The digestive action of the feathered race upon them improves, in some cases, instead of injuring their growing energy. Waves, winds, and birds fully explain the vegetations of every coral and volcanic island. The amazing muscular power and vital energy of birds to sustain their flights in their migrations, for distances that astonish us, will account for the plantations of the most distant isles and continents. Even insects people in land ponds and streams with fish, and are often them selves carried by the winds to great distances. Thus showers of their larvæ have often fallen from the clouds. From all these facts, no individual of right judgment can have any difficulty in perceiving how the most remote and unvisited regions have derived their varied vegetation. We need not have recourse to the unsupported hypothesis of spontaneous produc tion, which no circumstance that has been fully understood has at any time occurred to prove. When once a vegetable has become rooted in a soil, it is capable, if unchecked, of spreading to an indefinite extent. One tree has, in some regions, propagated into a large forest. But the possible produce which may issue from a single individual of this department of nature, like other facts that we have noticed, extends into calculations which exceed our comprehending faculty. We may close these remarks in the striking words of the author from whom we have largely quoted. The vegetable kingdom expands everywhere before us an immense portraiture of the Divine Mind, in its contriving skill, profuse imagination, conceiving genius, and exquisite taste, as well as its interesting qualities of the most gracious benignity and the most benevo·lent munificence. The various flowers we behold awaken these sentiments within us, and compel our reason to make these perceptions and this inference. They are the annual heralds and ever-returning pledges to us of his continuing beneficence, of his desire to please and to benefit us, and therefore of his parental and intellectual amiabilities. They come to us, together with the attendant seasons that nurse and evolve them, as the appointed assurances that the world we inhabit is yet to be preserved, and the present course of things go on. The thunder, the pestilence, and the tempest awe and humble us into dismaying recollections of his tremendous omnipotence and possible visitations, and of our total inability to resist or avert them; but the beauty and benefactions of his vegetable creations, the flowers and the fruits more especially, remind and assure us of his unforgetting care, of his condescending sympathy, of his paternal attentions, and of the same affectionate benignity still actuating his mind, which must have influenced it to design and execute such lovely and benevolent productions, that display the minutest thought, most elaborate compositions, and so much personal kindness. - THE ANIMAL KINGDOM. We now come to that grand division of organized nature which presents us with an almost infinite variety of beings which live, move, and feel. These are arranged by naturalists under two divisions, namely, the VERTEBRATA, those which have interior bony skeletons, and including quadrupeds, birds, fishes, and reptiles, and INVERTEBRATA, including those which have. no internal skeleton, such as shell-fishes of all kinds, every variety of insects, the gelatinous animals of the sea, as polypi, and the five-fingered jack, the infusoria, &c. These are again classed under different heads,* according to certain peculiarities. In the following sketch, we propose only to give a view of some of the most striking traits of the leading animal tribes. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF QUADRUPEDS. — Linnæus distinguished the quadrupeds of the earth into six orders, and added another for the cetaceous fishes, *For a classification of animals, see "Illustrative Anecdotes of the Animal Kingdom." giving them the general title of Mammalia, as they have all been created with the peculiar habit of maturing their offspring in a similar manner to the human race. These seven orders, subdivided into forty-eight genera, include above eight hundred species. The characters of the orders were taken by Linnæus from the number, situation, and structure of the teeth: the arrangement of Cuvier, now generally adopted, is founded upon the anatomical structure of the body. That animals have organs of sense corresponding with those of man, we all familiarly know. They see, hear, taste, smell, and feel, as well as we do, and some much more acutely. Both the dog and the wolf have an exquisite sense of smell; the cat, and some others, can see in the dark; the lynx is acute both in sight and smell; the raccoon is peculiarly sensitive in both smell and touch. Others have a quickness of hearing superior to ourselves; and some appear to be impressible by musical sounds. In the evolution of the animal embryo, the formation of its nervous system appears to precede its circulatory functions and fluid. Some curious experiments seem to show that the principle of life is independent of the nervous matter, as it continues in the body of some species for some time after the brain and spinal marrow are removed. All the quadrupeds utter sounds of some sort or other, which they can vary into so many tones as are necessary to give vent to their feelings, to denote their wants, or to communicate with each other. Whoever *We copy the greater part of this article, also, from Turner's *Sacred History of the World " |