vegetables are confined to one kind of soil, or rock, and will grow on no other. It is owing perhaps to the artificial combination of various materials that many vegetables grow on and around ruined fortifications and castles, among whose relics the botanist finds frequent objects of interest: the campanula nods on the battlement, and the wall-flower gives her odours to the breeze as it sighs round the lonely pile which had once echoed only to the voice of cheerfulness or revelry. The works of man are ever going to decay; those of nature are in perpetual renovation. The weed is green when grey the wall; But perhaps no scene, nor situation, is so intensely gratifying to the naturalist as the shore of the ocean. The productions of the latter element are innumerable, and the majesty of the mighty waters lends an interest unknown to an inland landscape. The loneliness, too, of the sea-shore is much cheered by the constant changes arising from the ebb and flow of the tide, and the undulations of the water's surface, sometimes rolling like mountains, and again scarcely murmuring on the beach. As you there gather Each flower of the rock, and each gem of the billow, you may feel with the poet, that there are joys in solitude, and that pleasures are to be found in the investigation of nature, of the most powerful and pleasing influence. There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, But nothing can be more beautiful than a view of the bottom of the ocean, during a calm, even around our own shores, but particularly in tropical climates, especially when it consists alternately of beds of sand and masses of rock. The water is frequently so clear and undisturbed, that at great depths the minutest objects are visible; groves of coral are seen expanding their variously coloured clumps, some rigid and immovable, and others waving gracefully their flexile branches. Shells of every form and hue glide slowly along the stones, or cling to the coral boughs like fruit; crabs, and other marine animals pursue their prey in the crannies of the rocks, and sea-plants spread their limber fronds in gay and gaudy irregularity, while the most beautiful fishes are on every side sporting around. The floor is of sand, like the mountain-drift, And the pearl-shells spangle the flinty snow; Their boughs where the tides and billows flow: The water is calm and still below, For the winds and waves are absent there, And the sands are bright as the stars, that glow The sea-flag streams through the silent water, To blush like a banner bathed in slaughter; The fan-coral sweeps through the clear deep sea; Are bending like corn on the upland lea; Is sporting amid those bowers of stone, Where the myriad voices of ocean roar The purple mullet and gold-fish rove, Through the bending twigs in the coral grove.* It would be easy to advance many more instances, in which the modifications of the masses of matter composing the surface of the earth favour the production of plants, but it is unnecessary, and we may rest satisfied that the present constitution of our globe is better suited to its inhabitants at large, whether animal or vegetable, than it could be by any change which the most ingenious mind could suggest; and we should never lose sight of the gratitude we owe to that Great Being who formed all the tremendous, the awful, and the * These beautiful lines are from an American poet. beautiful scenes which surround us in the heavens above, and in the earth beneath. The radiant sun; the moon's nocturnal lamp, Hence the green earth, and wild resounding waves: |