more flimsy raiment. The leaves may be considered as the lungs, from the quantity of air which they absorb and exhale. The branches and tendrils of the hop, the vine, and the ivy, resemble legs and arms. The circulation of sap, like that of blood, diffuses vigour and nourishment over all parts of the vegetable. The parts of generation agree with the most minute exactness. The seeds resemble little animals in embryo, and for number can only be compared to the astonishing abundance of nature shown in the spawn of fish. Each seed by degrees enlarges the milky juice, which forms its aliment, and is received from the parent plant, through vessels of the finest texture.

Plants possess an organical, although not a progressive motion. Mimosa, the sensitive plant, is well known to shrink at the touch. The dionaa closes its leaves the instant a fly settles upon them. The hedysarum gyrans, a native of Bengal, has the peculiar property of voluntary motion. Two small appendages or leaflets, situated on each side of the foot-stalk, alternately meet and recede during the greatest part of the day. The heliotrope* points its flowers to the sun, and seems eager to draw nourishment from his genial rays. Flowers always turn towards the light; under a serene sky they expand; rain and storms cause many of them, particularly trefoil, wood-sorrel, mountain ebony, wild senna, and the African marigold, to be contracted; and at night they bow their heads, and fold up their leaves, as if yielding to the power of sleep. Some of them, like some animals,

*The heliotrope, or turnesole, is the heliotropium tricoccum, very common in the environs of Montpellier and in Germany, but it is very different from the English sunflower.

sleep during the day, and wake during the night. The cactus grandiflorus opens its flowers on the setting of the sun, and closes them at break of day. The jalapa mirabilis never expands its flowers, but in the evening. The influence of heat in the vernal season is the same on animals and vegetables; for when the birds begin to warble in the forests, and the fish to move in the deeps, the plants shoot forth their flowers, and propa gate their kind. The wood anemone begins to blow in Sweden when the swallow arrives; and the marsh marigold flowers in Britain when the cuckoo sings.

These and various other analogies are sufficient to show, that the animal and vegetable kingdoms approach very near, or rather are united to each other; and that the ordinary distinctions made between them are more serviceable for the common purposes of discrimination, than consistent with the precision of true philosophy, or the essential differences of nature.

SECTION I. BOTANY.

This train of observation leads us by easy steps to the consideration of that pleasing science, which opens a regular prospect of the vegetable kingdom, and comprises the knowledge of all kinds of plants. The study of botany is not only an elegant amusement, and leads to a beautiful display of the order and variety established by nature; but from the different and important uses of plants in food, raiment, medicine, and many arts, it is of real and essential service to mankind.*

* Martyn's Letters on Botany. Ray, p. 207, &c. Linnæi Op. p. 24, &c. Loves of the plants, vol. i. Amoenitates Acad. vol. vi, p. 311, &c. Derham's Physico. Theol. p. 488, &c.

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The range of botany is wide and extensive, from the small moss and the fungi, which are intermixed with the common grass, to the towering pine and the majestic oak. The various kinds of grass, which coyer the earth; flowers of all hues and forms, which exhale the most fragrant odours; beautiful shrubs and stately trees, are all subjects of the dominions of Flora. "Linnæus, says Dr. Darwin, has divided the vegetable world into twenty-four classes; these classes into about an hundred and twenty orders; these contain about two thousand families, or genera; and these families about twenty thousand species, beside innumerable varieties, which the accidents of climate or cultivation have added to these species."

This number of plants must be exceedingly deficient if we consider how little is known of the vegetable productions of the globe. We are very slightly acquainted with the interior parts of Africa, with the three Arabias, the two Americas, with New Guinea, New Zealand, and the innumerable islands of the Southern Ocean. What have we ascertained in the immense Archipelagos of the Philippines and Moluccas, or of most of the Asiatic islands? The vast coasts of New Holland, and the island of Otaheite, are said to have a botany peculiar to themselves.

"Another Flora there of bolder hues,

And richer sweets beyond our garden's pride,
Plays o'er the fields, and showers with sudden hand
Exuberant spring."

THOMSON'S SUMMER.

Linnæus, the celebrated professor of Upsal, and president of the academy of Stockholm, rose superior

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to the difficulties of poverty, and raised himself to the highest distinction as a most laborious and accurate physiologist. With an extent and clearness of intellect, and a diligence of research peculiar to himself, he undertook the arduous task of reforming the whole system of botany. Before his time, the description of plants was so perplexed with difficult and abstruse terms, that it only tended to make their nature more obscure, and their study more repulsive. In two successive works, he has determined the genera and species of plants, in such a manner, that by retaining all the old names, which agreed with his new rules, and reforming all the rest, he established a clear nomenclature, founded upon the true principles of the art. He confined himself to a small number of technical words well chosen and appropriate, in order to make short definitions of the true character of plants. The new language of botany, which he thus invented, although it necessarily departed from the classical model, yet it was not encumbered with the tedious circumlocutions of the old descriptions, and is in general short, precise, and expressive. From the description of the vegetable tribes, he proceeded to assign them particular names, and thus familiarized them in such a manner, that, by his appropriate appellations, a botanist is enabled, at first sight, to name any plant he has ever seen before, as well as to know its nature by its fructification, and understand its properties by an apt and clear description.

But the glory of Linnæus arose from his making the sexual discriminations of plants the basis of his system. Those parts, which had before been regarded as useless and superfluous, were raised to the rank that nature had originally designed for them. This

was a work of great labour, and required the most accurate observation; for not only the genera, but every species were to be examined by their stamina and pistils, as he determined those to be the only parts essentially necessary to fructification. This distinction appeared to many, at first sight, to be too frivolous, as they thought that nature had not been scrupulously exact in her productions: but since the Linnæan system has been established, there is no student of botany, who is able to determine the precise character of any genus, without having the accurate idea of these discriminating parts.

The system of Linnæus appears to be more conformable to nature than any yet offered to the world: it has this peculiar excellence, that the name of each vegetable gives us its description: and if there be any defect in his four and twenty classes, it must be attributed to the necessary deficiency of any artificial arrangement, when applied to the infinite variety of

nature.

Without any intention to detract from the reputation of this great naturalist, we may venture to assert, that his merit consists not so much in the first discovery, as in the adoption and establishment of the sexual system. Plain intimations of it are given by some of the ancient naturalists, particularly by Aristotle and Theophrastus. Herodotus mentions, that it was a custom of the natives of Babylon to carry the flowers of the male to the female palm-tree, and thus assist the operations of nature in producing fruit. This curious fact was confirmed by the observation of Hasselquist, in the middle of the last century. Nor did it escape the researches of Ray and Millington, who flourished many years before the time of Linnæus.