LOWLY VEGETABLE FORMS. 



473 



Bome of the humblest lichens and mosses. Although these plants 

 occupy but a very subsidiary and unimportant position among the 

 vegetation which surrounds us in our daily walks, and are concealed 

 in isolated patches in the woods and fields by the luxuriance of higher 

 and more conspicuous plants, yet they constitute the sole vegetation 

 of very extensive regions of the earth's surface. Every part of the 

 globe, within a thousand feet of the line of perpetual snow, is redeemed 

 from utter desolation by these plants alone. Above the valleys and 

 the lower slopes which form the step of transition from plain to moun- 

 tain inhabited by prosperous and civilized nations is the domain of 

 mist and mystery, the region of storm a world which is not of this 

 world, where God and Nature are all in all, and man is nothing ; and in 

 this unknown region there are immense tracts familiar to the eye of 

 wild bird, to the summer cloud, the stars and meteors of the night 

 strange to human faces and the sound of human voices, where the 

 lichen and the moss alone luxuriate and carpet the sterile ground. 

 The grandest and sublimest regions of the earth are adorned with gar- 

 lands of the minutest and humblest plants ; they are the tapestry, the 

 highly-wrought carpeting laid down in the vestibules of Nature's pal- 

 aces. If we look at a map of the world, we see that Europe and Asia 

 are held together as it were by a huge ridge or backbone of moun- 

 tain-elevation, which, although suffering partial interruption, may be 

 roughly described as continuous from one ocean to another. It begins 

 with the mountains of Biscay in Spain, passes on through the Pyrenees, 

 with a slight interruption, into the Alps, which throw off the important 

 spur or rib of the Apennines ; thence it divides into the Balkan and 

 Carpathians. We trace the chain next in the Caucasus and the moun- 

 tains of Armenia with the interruption of the Caspian Sea passing 

 into the Hindoo Coosh and the Himalaya Mountains, whence the 

 chain forks and takes a direction north and south, enclosing like walls 

 the whole delta of China, and thence dips into the eastern ocean. In 

 Africa also, at its widest part, there is a similar backbone, beginning 

 not far from Sierra Leone, and losing itself in the east in the moun- 

 tains of Abyssinia; while in America the mountain-spine trends north 

 and south from the Hudson's Bay territories, through the Rocky 

 Mountains, uninterruptedly through the Isthmus of Panama, along the 

 Andes to the Straits of Magellan. These vast mountain-systems, with 

 their culminating regions in the Andes, Alps, and Himalayas, and 

 their subsidiary branches or ribs in the Grampians, Dovrefields, Ural, 

 and Atlantic ranges, are clothed on their sides, summits, and elevated 

 plateaus, almost exclusively with cryptogamic vegetation, and enable 

 us to form some conception of the immense altitudinal range of these 

 plants. Then there are whole islands in the Arctic and Antarctic 

 Oceans whose vegetation also is almost entirely cellular. The north- 

 ern portion of Lapland, the continent of Greenland, the large islands 

 of Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, and Iceland, the extensive territories 



