gonal decoration. Anacreon sweetly sings his delight from vegetable nature,*—and most enthusiastically of the rose,t though he also twines the lily and the hyacinth round his forehead, as an attractive and festive ornament. Their presence, and the scenery and companions which always surround them, have excited in many poets, of all nations, their finest thoughts and feelings. It has been a favourite theme to the imagination to fancy, or to sing, that herbs, *Thus in his twenty-second Ode:-"O sit in this shade! That tree, how beautiful! On its most tender sprays, how it shakes its young Jocks! while the fountain near it, flowing persuasion, excites our attachment. Who that looks on this can pass away from such a place of repose?" "Lo! how the Graces scatter roses on the advancing spring.-The shadows of the clouds are departing. The labour of mortals glistens. Earth is nurturing her fruits; that of the olive is just born, and the juice of the vine, blossoming from the branch and leaf, crowns it with its fruit."--Anac. Ode 37. In his fifth Ode, he calls it "The rose of the loves;-adapting to our temples its beautiful foliage. Transcendent flower!-Spring's fostered care a delight even to the gods!" But in his 53d effusion he is most eloquent in its praise:-"With the flower-crowned spring, I sing the summer rose-the breath of gods-the enchantment of mortals!-the ornament of the Graces in the season of their floral loves -the play-toy of Venus. Ever grateful to the Muses, how sweet to him who travels through the briery dells! How sweet to him who plucks it with gentle hand, to cherish it in his bosom-who lightly raises to his lip the flower of love! It is pleasant on the roof, and on the joyous table, and to the feasts of Bacchus. What can be without the rose "Anac. Od. "See how it becomes us to twine the white lilies amid the roses into chaplets."-Od. 34. "Entwining coronals of hyacinths round my temples."-Anac. Od. 42. As in one of the delicious passages of MILTON, which has never been excelled: "Sweet is the breath of morn; her rising sweet, Parad. Lost, B. 4. and flowers, and trees could sympathize with human sora row. The Greeks used flowers as part of their funeral tributes of regard; and their priests consecrated to Iris the trees on which the rainbow seemed to rest. The Turks preserve the ancient use of flowers as symbols of the language of the feelings, and make them the silent and secret epistolary messengers of their sensibilities,◊--they also apply them lavishly round the graves of those they love, to express their attachment and grief. But however fanciful these ideas and customs may be, they are evidence how eminently vegetable nature has at Thus Moschus, in his Greek hexameter epitaph on Bion, indulges the supposition of the possible sensibility of vegetable nature: "Mourn with me, ye plants! woods! now bewail! Express your tokens of grief. The beautiful singer is dead So he apostrophizes his lost friend :- "At your dissolution, The trees threw down their fruit, and Μοσχα Ειδ. γι This seems extravagant: thongh Milton has partly imitated it in his Lycidas. But it may have been a belief of the Greek poets, since one of their few natural philosophers, also a versifter, Empedocles, could say, "The first of all animals were trees, and sprang from the earth before the sun enriched the world, and before days and nights were distin guished."-Plat. Plac. c. 26. . . . If Plato and Empedocles could teach "That plants are informed with a soul, and that of this there is a clear proof, for they tremble and shake; and when their branches are bent down by the woodman, they yield but to spring back again to their for mer uprightness" (Plut. ib ), we may believe that poets allowed them some sympathizing feelings. ↑ Thus Bio, in his Elegy on Adonis, exclaims,-" Bring Adonis, how ever ghastly-place him between the crowns and the flowers-but since he has been dead, all the flowers have withered-v. 74-76. The poet expresses also these too-pretty fancies :-" But his remains have turned all things on the earth into flowers. His blood produced the rose; and his tears the anemone."-v. 65. . . . The anemone was made by the Egyptians an emblem of sickness.--Hor. Ap. 1. 2, c. 8. Plutarch informs us, "The rainbow clouds make the trees fragrant on which they fall. Our priests call these trees Iris-protected,' imagining that Iris takes care of them."-Symp. 1. 4. Lady Mary Montagite was the first who made England acquainted With this custom of the enamoured Turks to make flowers their love letters; their conventional meaning, when so sent, being mutually uni derstood. all periods and in all countries affected the imagination and the feelings of mankind. It is a fair inference from the universal fact, and from the concurring impressions on ourselves, that they were made to have this interesting effect, as well as to beautify our inhabited surface.* But it is not an imagination-it is a sober reality to say, that wherever they have been cherished and cultivated, they have drawn the human spirit to seek and value the gentler and kinder dispositions and occupations of our very deviable, moveable, irascible, and sturdy self-will.† As these moral, intellectual, and religious results are the natural effects of the vegetable creation upon mankind, and appear, more or less, so much in all countries and in all ages, as to indicate that impressions of this sort are universal, we are entitled to infer that these consequences were among the purposes for which this order of beings was created, and which they were appointed to produce. * After describing this part of creation, Milton forcibly adds— "Earth now Seem'd like to heav'n; a seat where gods might dwell Her sacred shades."--B. 7. The 1 The connexion which the ancient Easterns felt between vegetable nature and their affectionate sympathies, we perceive in the effusions of SOLOMON, in whom even his gorgeous state could not suppress the impressions of his Flora and Pomona. "My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; The time of the singing of birds is come, And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; The fig-tree putteth forth her green figs, And the vines with the tender grape give their fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away." "Come, my beloved, Let us go forth into the field, Sol. Song, ch. 2, ver. 10-13 Let us get up early to the vineyards; Whether the tender grape appear, And the pomegranates bud forth."-Ib. ch. 7, ver. 11, 12. "Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; Blow upon my garden, that its spices may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, And eat his pleasant fruits."-Ib. ch. 4, ver. 16. general effects of all made things imply that the intention of the Maker was to produce them. So we may reason as to the design and ends of the Creator in his vegetable classes. They increase our knowledge of him; they are the pledges of his affection for his human race, and gentle attractions of our sensibilities to him; they are the great sources of our subsistence, conveniences, and improvements; they are the basis of all animal nutrition; they furnish our most constant gratifications and purest pleasures; they tend to link our kind feelings with each other, by the sympathizing admiration which their beauties excite; the cultiva tion they require is our most virtuous and beneficial occupation; and their serviceable properties are so arranged as to compel us to this useful cultivation, by their produce being made to arise from it. Their operation on our intellectual faculties and moral emotions is likewise that of a soothing melioration, which increases as our mind advances in its progressive civilization. All the beautiful thoughts and sentiments which poetry has breathed in every age, in praise of verdant or floral nature, and of the rural life, are the expressed homage of the heart to the charms and utilities of the vegetable creation, and are so many undesigned but implied encomiums on its invisible Author, for planning and ordaining it. Whatever we may mean, or whatever phrases we may use, we cannot commend nature without praising him. The panegyric flies immediately from the insensate beauties we may admire, to the mind which designed them and to the power which produced them. Carbon and oxygen are but the same things in the rose as they are in the gray limestone rock. It is the intellect and taste of the sublime Mechanist which has combined and arranged them, and similar brute matter, into loveliness and fragrance in the one, and left them to be in the other uninteresting shapelessness and dirty deformity.* Both the heart and reason feel that the poet of the Brasons has justly as well as beautifully sung, "These, as they change, Almighty Father! these L The system established for the perpetuated existence of vegetation upon earth is another surprising invention of the Divine intelligence. We have now got rid of the unfounded and unphilosophical supposition of spontaneous generation. This was one of the dreams of ignorant times, when any absurdity was welcomed by some, that they might not believe in a creating power. Malpighi and Redi, and others since, have satisfactorily proved that both plants and animals arise from organized parents.* Earth produces no plant whatever, in any country, unless a seed or some vegetable germ be first deposited within it. On this point nature is constant. No law that she unfolds to our notice is more invariable than the production of her organized bodies solely from anteceding ones of the same sort. Organization only can produce organization; brute, inorganic matter never does. It never has been found to do so, and we may be sure it never can. Organization could only arise from its Creator at first skilfully combining it; and it is perpetuated by the marvellous power which he has added to it, of producing within itself new organized bodies of the same form and properties. Thus constructed and endowed, it has acted ever since, in all its appointed configurations, to fabricate within them a reproductive succession of the same kind of distinct individuals, and no other. Thy bounty shines in autumn unconfin'd, How natural to add "Soft roll your incense, herbs, and fruits, and flowers! Whose breath perfumes you, and whose pencil paints." Malpighi's important researches and reasoning, addressed to our Royal Society, from Bologna, 1681, are on the anatomy of plants-the vegetation of seeds--of plants that grow on others--on roots and on gall nuts. He considers seeds as the eggs of plants, "e materno ovario delapsa, and requiring the fostering bosom of the great mother earth."De. San. 14. Of this seed the plant is the foetus.-Anat. 9. He shows the careful organizations and provisions made in nature to produce, preserve, and cherish all its vegetable offspring; and his experiments and observations fully show that it is only from such organized parents that any plant comes into existence; none by mere material accretion; and that there is a very great analogy between vegetable and animal evolution and growth, but more within the viviparous than the oviparous ova. -Anat. p. 81. His conclusion is, that a seed is an ovum containing a foetus, which may for years be kept prolific.-P. 82. |