on they both remonstrated; but in vain. Rogers got out, and stood expecting them. 'Oh! you see why Rogers don't mind getting out,' exclaimed my father, laughing and leaning out of the carriage, 'he has got goloshes on!'"

When Turner illustrated his poems, the artist was to have received £50 apiece for the drawings. But Rogers objected to the price, which he had "miscalculated," and Turner agreed to take them all back, receiving £5 each for the use of them. The banker did not foresee a time when the purchase would have been a very good speculation indeed: if he had, there is little doubt he would have paid for them. He made other bargains that were more remunerative: the famous "Puck" of Sir Joshua Reynolds he purchased for £215 58.

The house-in which he passed so many years of his life, from the year 1803 to its close-in St. James' Place, is still there; but it is not a shrine that any pilgrim will much care to visit. Few great men of the age have excited so little heroworship; those who would have been mourners at his funeral had preceded him to the tomb; he left none to honor or to cherish his memory. His house had been full of Art-luxuries, gathered by judicious expenditure of wealth, and by highly cultivated taste; they were scattered by the hammer of the auctioneer after his death, and are the gems of a hundred collections. Yet the house will be always one of the memorable dwellings of London. "It was," I borrow the eloquent words of Mr. Hayward, "here that Erskine told the story of his first brief, and Grattan that of his last duel; that Wellington described Waterloo as a 'battle of giants'; that Chantrey, placing his hand on a mahogany pedestal, asked the host he then honored by his presence-Do you remember a workman who, at five shillings a day, came in at that door to receive your orders? I was that workman!' There had assembled Byron, Moore, Scott, Campbell, Wordsworth, Washington Irving, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, Sheridan, and a host of other immortal men, who gave renown to the nineteenth century, and live for aye in Fame's eternal volume.''

No; the aged banker-poet who had lived so long, seen so much, been intimate with

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so many of the great men and women of the epoch, who had all his life held "in trust a huge amount of wealth, with its weighty responsibilities, has not bequeathed to us a "memory" that may be either venerated or loved. From no "sort of men" did he gather "golden opinions ;" his heart was in a perpetual solitude; he seemed continually to quail under the burden of" a discontented and repining spirit," although God had been specially bountiful to him in all the good things of earth. He might have been a vast blessing to thousands: those who owed him aught that was not repaid, may surely be counted by units. In all I have heard and read concerning him, and it is muchI cannot find evidence that he had, at any time, "learned the luxury of doing good."

He himself states that Madame de Staël once said to him, "How very sorry I am for Campbell! His poverty so unsettles his mind that he cannot write.' This was the answer of Rogers:-"I replied, 'Why does he not take the situation of a clerk? He could then compose verses during his leisure hours ;'" and he adds, "I shall never forget the delight with which, on returning home [from his bank to his mansion], I used to read and write during the evening; " moralizing thus: "When literature is the sole business of life, it becomes a drudgery: when we are able to resort to it only at certain times, it is a charming relaxation."

Ah! had he but known what it is to "sweat the brain" not only all day long, but far into midnight; to toil when the hand shakes and the head aches from over-work-when the labor of to-day must earn the sustenance of to-morrow, and not always that; to work, work, work, and be sent by nature, hungry, to sleep that is not rest; to endure far worse than these physical sufferings "the proud man's contumely," the consciousness of power while fetters gall and fret; heartsick from hope deferred; a gleam of faroff glory that scorches the brow; the thousand ills that "unsettle the mind," so that the hand cannot write. Ay, authorship may be a " pleasant relaxation," when it is not a means by which men live; when, well or ill, sad or merry, in joy or in sorrow, prosperous or afflicted-no matter which there is that to be done

that must be done, and which may not be postponed because it is "a drudgery." When Rogers uttered these words in protest against the generous sympathy of Madame de Staël, there were men starying in London streets, whose minds were pregnant with even greater creations than the "Pleasures of Memory," or "Human Life," and who gave them to the world before they left it. Crabbe may by that time have found means to buy, and pay for, food and clothes; Campbell may have been on the eve of rescue from poverty by the pension he earned and gained; Southey may have had his home fireside cheered by a remittance from Murray; and Leigh Hunt may have stayed the cravings of angry creditors by aid of some sympathizing friend: but there were scores of great men obscurely hidden in mighty London, whose struggles with penury would appal those whom "pleasure, ease, and affluence surround,"-enduring "all the sad varieties of woe," some of whom may have made their wants known, while others triumphantly averted the bitter end; though others were voluntary victims before their work was half done.

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It might have been the glory of Samnel Rogers to have helped them out of the Slough of Despond!

Popular Science Review.

discovery, of the necessity for insect and other foreign agencies in insuring fertility, and hence perpetuating the species, we shall find that the powers of climate and soil are reduced to comparatively very narrow limits. Before proceeding to show what are the causes that do materially limit the distribution of species, it may be well to inquire how far the hard-pressed soil and climate theory really helps us to a practical understanding of one or two great questions that fall under our daily observation; of these, the following are the most prominent:

That very similar soils and climates, in different geographical areas, are not inhabited, naturally, either by like species, or like genera;-that very different soils and climates will produce almost equally abundant crops of the same cultivated plants;-and that in the same soil and climate many hundreds, nay, thousands of species, from other very different soils and climates, may be grown, and propagated, for an indefinite number of successive generations.

Of the first of these statements, the examples embrace some of the best known facts in geographical botany; as, for example, that the Flora of Europe differs wholly from that of temperate North America, South Africa, Australia, and temperate South America, and all these from one another. And that neither soil nor climate is the cause of this difference, is illustrated by the fact, that

AMONGST PLANTS.

BY J. D. HOOKER, M.D., F.R.S.

THE quaint dictum, "Plants do not grow where they like best, but where other plants will let them," which is credited to the late eminent horticulturist, Dean Herbert, of Manchester, expresses a truth not yet half appreciated by botanists. It is a protest against the prevalent belief, that circumstances of climate and soil are the omnipotent regulators of the distribution of vegetables, and that all other considerations are comparatively powerless. The dean's crude axiom has lately found a philosophical exposition and expression in Mr. Darwin's more celebrated doctrine of the "Struggle for life, and preservation thereby of the favored races," and if to it we add that great naturalist's more fruitful

tries are covered, year after year, by crops of the same plant, introduced from one to the other; and by annually increasing numbers of trees, shrubs, and herbs, that have either run wild, or are successfully cultivated in each and all of them. The third proposition follows from the two others, and of this the best example is afforded by a good garden, wherein, on the same soil and under identical conditions, we grow, side by side, plants from very various soils and climates, and ripen their seeds too, provided only that their fertilization is insured. The Cape geraniums, London pride and Lysimachia nummularia in our London areas, the pendent American cacti in the cottage windows of Southwark and Lambeth are even more striking examples of the comparative indiffer

ence of many plants to good or bad climate and soil; and what can be more unlike their natural conditions than those to which ferns are exposed in those invaluable contrivances, Ward's cases, in the heart of the city? True, the conditions suit them well, and with respect to humidity and equability of temperature, are natural to them; but, neither is the absolute temperature, nor the constitution, nor freshness of the air, the same as of the places the ferns are brought from; nor is any systematic attempt made to suit the soil to the species cultivated, for, as Mr. Ward himself well shows, the arctic saxifrage, the English rose, the tropical palm, and desert cactus live side by side in the same box, and under precisely similar circumstances, and, as it were, in defiance of their natal condi

tions.

Let it not be supposed that we at all underrate such power as soil and climate really possess. In some cases, as those of chalk, sand, bog, and saline and water plants, soil is very potent; but the zumber of plants actually dependent on these, or other peculiarities of the soil, is much more limited than is supposed. Of bona fide water-plants, there are few amongst phænogams. Sand plants, as a rule, grow equally well on stiffer soils, but are there turned out by more sturdy competitors; and with regard to the calcareous soils, it is their warmth and dryness that fits them, to so great an extent, for many plants that are almost confined to them, or are absolutely peculiar to them. So, too, with regard to temperature, there are limits as regards heat, cold, and humidity, that species will not overstep and live; but, on the other hand, so much has been done by selection in procuring hardy races of tender plants, and so much may be done by regulating the distribution of earth-temperature, &c., that we already grow tropical plants in the open air during a portion of the year, and eventually may do so for longer periods.

Amongst the most striking examples of apparent indifference to natural conditions of soil and climate, I would especially adduce two. One is the Salicornia Arabica, a plant never found in its natural state, except in most saline situations, but which has flourished for years

in the Succulent House at Kew, in a pot full of common soil, to which no salt has ever been added; the other is the tea plant, which luxuriates in the hot humid valleys of Assam, where the thermometer ranges between 70° and 85°, and the atmosphere is so perennially humid, that watches are said to be destroyed after a few months of wear; and it is no less at home in North-Western India, where the summers are as hot and cloudless as any in the world, and the winters very cold. I may add, that the tea plant has survived the intense cold of this last January, at Kew, on the same wall where many hardy and half-hardy plants have been killed.

It is, further, a great mistake to suppose that the native vegetation of a country suffers little and very exceptionally by abnormal seasons. The most conspicuous instance of the contrary that ever fell under my observation was the destruction of the gigantic gum-tree (Eucalyptus) forests, in the central districts of Tasmania, which occurred, if I remember right, about the year 1837. In 1840 I rode over many square miles of country, through stupendous forests, in which every tree was, to all appearance, absolutely lifeless. The district was totally uninhabited, consisting of low mountain ranges, 2,000 feet above the sea, separating marshy tracts interspersed with broad fresh-water lakes. The trees, much like the great gaunt elms in Kensington Gardens during winter, but much larger, were in countless multitudes, 80 to 180 feet high, close-set, and 10 to 20 feet in girth; their weird and ghostly aspect being heightened by the fact of most being charred for a considerable distance up the trunk, the effects of the native practice of firing the grass in summer during the kangaroo hunting season; and by the bark above, hanging from their trunks in streaming shreds, that waved dismally in the wind; for the species was the stringy-bark gum, that sheds its bark after this fashion. And not only had the gum trees suffered, the hardier Leptospermum (tea-tree bush), and many others, were killed, some to the ground, and some altogether; so that though my journey was in spring, and the weather was delightful, the aspect of the vegetation. was desolate in the extreme.

In such climates as our own, similar devastations are unknown, and though we know that our island was once covered with other timber than now clothes it, we have every reason to suppose that the change was slow, and the effect either of a gradually altered climate, or of the immigration of trees equally well or better suited to the conditions of the soil and climate, but which had not previously had the opportunity of contesting the ground with the ruling monarchs of

the forest.

Making every allowance, then, for the influence of soil and climate in checking the multiplication of individuals, we have still two classes of facts to account for; the one, that plants which succeed so well, when cultivated, that we are assured both soil and climate are favorable to their propagation, nevertheless become immediately or soon extinct when the cultivator's care is withdrawn; the other, that plants of one country, when introduced into another, even with a very different soil and climate, will overrun it, destroy the native vegetation, and prove themselves better suited to local circumstances than the aboriginal plants of the country. In the first case, the reasons are very various, all of them relating to the conditions of the plant's existence. Of these the two most potent are, the absence of fertilizing agents, and the destruction of seeds and seedling plants. In the present state of our knowledge it is impossible to say which of these is most fatal in its effect. In the case of our annual plants, or our cereals, which never run wild, it is the latter certainly, for they seed freely enough; in the case of many perennials, shrubs, and trees, it may be the former, as with the common elm and lime, which rarely or never seed in England, though the latter is so notably frequented by insects during its flowering season; whilst a third cause is to be found in their seedling plants being smothered by others, of which we have numerous examples in our common pasture grasses, which are, perhaps, the most prejudicial in this respect. A most conspicuous example of this is afforded by the common maple, of which the seedlings come up early in spring by thousands in the neighborhood of the parent tree, in lawns and plantations, but scarceNEW SERIES-VOL. VI. No. 1.

ly ever survive the smothering effects of the common summer grasses, as soon as these begin to shoot.

When I visited the cedar grove on Mount Lebanon in the autumn of 1860, I found thousands of seedling plants, but every one of them dead; and so effectual is the annual slaughter of the yearlings in that grove, that, though the seeds are shed in millions, and innumerable seedlings annually spring up, there is not a plant in the grove less than about sixty years old. It may hence have been sixty years since a cedar there survived the first year of its existence; that is to say, has struggled through its infancy, and reached the age even of childhood! *

On the other hand, when once the natural conditions of a country have been disturbed, the spread and multiplication of immigrants is so rapid that it shortly becomes impossible to discover the limits of the old, indigenous Flora. Take the English Flora, for example. If we contrast the cultivated counties with the uncultivated, the difference of their vegetation is so great that I have often been compelled to doubt whether many of the most familiar so-called wild flowers of the cultivated counties are indigenous at all; nay, more, I have been tempted to suspect that some of the more variable of them, as some species of chenopodium and fumitory, may have originated since cultivation began. In the uncultivated counties, the proportion of annual plants is exceedingly small, whereas, in the cultivated counties, annuals are very numerous; and the further we go from cultivation, roads, and made ground, the rarer they become, till at last, in the uninhab

Professor Hooker has fallen into the common error of supposing that there remains but a solitary cedar grove on Lebanon, whereas the Rev. Mr. Jessup, a very intelligent American missionary in Syria, has discovered, and locates and describes from personal observation, in Hours at Home, no less than eleven distinct cedar groves on Mount Lebanon; and he affirms that with proper care on the part of the people and the Government, whose attention has already been called to the subject, by sowing the seeds in the upper ranges, and carefully protecting the young trees from the sheep and goats, not many years would elapse before these arid heights would be clothed with liv

ing green, and "the glory of Lebanon" return

again. See Hours at Home for March and April, 1867, for a highly interesting description of these newly-discovered groves.-EDITOR ECLECTIC.

3

ited islets of the west coast of Scotland, and in its mountainous glens, annuals are extremely rare, and confined to the immediate vicinity of cottages. Let any one who doubts this contrast between the Floras of cultivated and uncultivated regions compare the annuals in such Floræ as those of Suffolk or Essex, the North Riding or Cumberland, with those of the Isle of Wight and the Isle of Arran. And it is not only that annuals abound in cultivated districts, but that so many are nearly confined to ground that is annually or frequently disturbed. The three commonest of all British plants, for example, are, perhaps, groundsel, shepherd's purse, and Poa annua. I do not remember ever having seen any of these plants established where the soil was undisturbed, or where, if undisturbed, they had not been obviously brought by man, or the lower animals; and yet I have gathered one of these, the shepherd's purse, in various parts of Europe, in Syria, in the Himalayas, in Australia, New Zealand, and the Falkland Islands. Were England to be depopulated, I believe that in a very few years these plants, and a large proportion of our common annual "wild flowers" would become exceed ingly rare, or extinct, such as the Poppies, Fumatories, Trefoils, Fedias, various species of Speedwell, Anagallis, Cerastiums, Lithospermum, Polygonum, Mallow, Euphorbia, Thlaspi, Senebiera, Medicago, Anthemis, Centaurea, Linaria, Lamium, &c., &c.

It is usually said of some of the above named plants, that they prefer cultivated ground, nitrogenous soil, and so forth; and this is no doubt true, but that they will flourish where no such advantages attend them, a very little observation shows; and that they do not continue to flourish elsewhere is due mainly to the fact that, being annuals, their room is taken as soon as they die, and the next year's seedling has no chance of success in the struggle with perennials.

For good instances of this rapid replacement of annuals by perennials, the new railroad embankments should be examined. Whence the plants come from, which spring up like magic in the cuttings, many feet below the surface of the soil, is a complete mystery, and reminds us of the so-called spontaneous

generation of protozoa in newly-made infusions, or in distilled water. In the south of Scotland in 1840-50, and many parts of the north of England, the first plant that made its appearance was Equisetum arvense, which covered the new-formed banks for miles and miles. with the most lovely green forest of miniature pines. In the following year comparatively few of these were to be seen, and coltsfoot, dandelion, and other biennials, especially Umbelliferæ, with a great number of annuals presented themselves. For many successive years, I had no opportunity of watching the struggle for life on these banks, but when I last saw them they were clothed with perennial grasses, docks, plantains, and other perennial rooted plants.

The destruction of native vegetations, by introduced, is a subject that has only lately attracted much attention, but it has already assumed an aspect that has startled the most careless observer. Some thirty years ago the fecundity of the horse and European cardoon in the Argentine provinces of South America, so graphically described by Sir Edmund Head, drew the attention of naturalists to the fact, that animals and plants did not necessarily thrive best where found in an indigenous condition; and the spread of the common Dutch clover, Trifolium repens, in North America, where it follows the footsteps of man through the trackless forests, has long afforded an equally remarkable instance of vegetable colonization. Still more recently, in South Africa, Australia, and Tasmania, the Scotch thistle, briar, rose, Xanthium, plantains, docks, &c., have all become noxious weeds; and this leads me to the last and most curious point to which I shall allude in this article, viz., that the same annuals and other weeds, that are held so well in check by the indigenous perennial plants of our country, when transplanted to others, show themselves superior to the perennial vegetation of the latter. Of this New Zealand furnishes the most conspicuous example, it was first visited scarcely more than 100 years ago, and it is not yet fifty since the missionaries first settled in it, and scarce thirty since it received its earliest colonists. The Islands contain about 1,000 species of flowering plants,