II. 



HARMONIES. 



MoDEEN science has shewn that animals and plants are 

 not scattered promiscuously over the world, but placed 

 in spheres according to well-defined laws. A few kinds 

 seem, indeed, cosmopolitan, but the great majority have 

 a limited range, each inhabiting its own region, and each, 

 in very many cases, replaced in other similar regions by 

 species more or less closely allied and yet distinct. And 

 more than this ; that there are predominant forms of life 

 in every region, so entirely governing the physiognomy of 

 the landscape, that an accomplished naturalist, on being 

 suddenly set down in any part of the earth's surface, 

 would instantly tell in what region he was, by an examina- 

 tion of a few plants or animals. 



The statistics on which this science of the geogra- 

 phical distribution of life is built up do not come 

 within my present scope, which is to present the poetic 

 side of nature ; but there is a collateral aspect of the 

 same truths worthy of consideration, namely, the har- 

 mony which subsists between all the parts of a natural- 

 history picture. If we look with interest on the lion, the 

 jaguar, the zebra, the python, at the Zoological Gardens, 

 or the palms, and bananas, and bamboos in the con- 



