84 BOTANY OF THE 
ground by-the Naturalist, as the opening scene of the labours 
of Humboldt, who there first appreciated, in their full extent, 
the laws governing the geographical distribution of plants. 
His life-like pictures of the natural phenomena, observed 
during an ascent of the famous Peak, have given to many 
succeeding scientific travellers that impulse which has turned 
their thoughts and steps from closet studies and the pursuit 
of Natural History at home, and induced them to seek fat 
distant scenes, in the West, the East and the South. 
The Peak itself is seldom descried: one hurried glimpse of 
its very apex, from upwards of sixty miles’ distance, was all 
we obtained : it then appeared like a little short and broad 
cone high in the clouds, or rather as an opaque triangular 
spot on the firmament. It is difficult to imagine this to be 
the “ culminating point;” that mighty mass, at whose base 
the toil-worn traveller pauses ; who, having surmounted four- 
fifths of the mountain, finds his heart quail at beholding à 
* Pelion upon Ossa piled,” so stern, so stony and so steep. 
Much and deeply did the officers of Captain Ross' and 
Trotter’s Expeditions deplore the necessity of hurrying 
from this spot, most interesting to the sailor; being the 
point for which every circumnavigator first steers, and from 
whence, with chronometers carefully corrected at its well- 
determined position, he takes his departure. For years 
too, this was the prime Meridian, distance in longitude 
at sea having been at one period reckoned from Teneriffe, 25 
zero, by all the seafaring nations of Europe; and by some it is 
so still. From the days of the earliest circumnavigators, tO 
the present, the words “ we sighted the Peak of Teneriffe,” 
indicate that page in the narrative, from which all that is 
interesting in the voyage commences. 
In the History of Geology, the Canary Islands hold a 
conspicuous position. Von Buch developed his theory of 
craters of elevation from what he there observed: his name 
too recalls, and most appropriately, that of his fellow-la- 
bourer on the same shores, Christian Smith, the amiable 
and gifted Swede, who first, after Humboldt, explored their 
, 
