TRANSACTIONS. 87 



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wlio became domiciliated in France. There is an important 

 society, liberally patronized by the French government, 

 which devotes itself to experimenting upon the acclimation 

 of exotics, and its labors are thought to promise very in- 

 teresting results. 



In this country the Thibet goat is said to have succeed- 

 ed well. The buffalo of the Levant has been brought to 

 South Carolina, where it is supposed he may supply the 

 place of the ox, which does not labor to great advantage 

 in that climate ; and our government is now experimenting 

 on a large scale with the dromedary and burden camel. 

 But independently of these and other similar experi- 

 ments, when we remember that almost every plant which 

 we grow as food for men, except Indian corn and the pota- 

 to, and all the animals which we rear in the domestic state, 

 besides many tribes of the smaller animated creatures, and 

 of noxious weeds, have been introduced into xhis continent 

 in the space of three centuries, we cannot but consider it 

 as highly probable that our soil and climate are capable of 

 furnishing localities adapted to a much greater range of 

 vegetable and animal life than we now possess. Some 

 vegetable physiologists have denied the possibility of ef- 

 fecting any such change in the character of plants as to fit 

 them for growth and reproduction in climates liable to 

 greater extremes of heat and cold than those in which the 

 species originated. But our own American experience 

 with maize and the potato, and with numerous plants of 

 tropical and sub-tropical origin, which now grow through 

 a great part of the temperate zone, seems to furnish a sat- 

 isfactory practical refutation of this doctrine. Indeed, the 

 tomato, which is now thoroughly acclimated, and even 

 spontaneously propagates itself, very often failed to ripen 

 in our Northern states thirty years since, and all the culti- 

 vated plants of warmer regions seem to be making some 

 progress to the North. 



In attempting the introduction of new objects into our 



