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;
And blossoms rise where turrets fall.

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,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar.*

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;
From coral rocks the sea-plants lift

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
In the motionless fields of
upper air;
There with its waving blade of green,

The sea-flag streams through the silent water,
And the crimson leaf of the dulse is seen

To blush like a banner bathed in slaughter;
There, with a light and easy motion,

The fan-coral sweeps through the clear deep sea;
And the yellow and scarlet tufts of ocean

Are bending like corn on the upland lea;
And life, in rare and beautiful forms,

Is sporting amid those bowers of stone,
And is safe, when the wrathful spirit of storms
Has made the top of the wave his own:
And when the ship from his fury flies,

Where the myriad voices of ocean roar
When the wind-god frowns in the murky skies,
And demons are waiting the wreck on shore;
Then far below, in the peaceful sea,

The purple mullet and gold-fish rove,
Where the waters murmur tranquilly,

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,
The mountains and the streams: the ample stores
Of earth, of heaven, of nature. From the first,
On that full scene his love divine he fix'd,
His admiration. Till in time complete,
What he admired and loved his vital power
Unfolded into being. Hence the breath
Of life informing each organic frame:

Hence the green earth, and wild resounding waves:
Hence light and shade, alternate, warmth and cold;
And bright autumnal skies, and vernal showers,
And all the fair variety of things.