220 VIEWS OF NATURE. 



phenomena, and however much the total impression may be 

 influenced by the outline of mountains and hills, the physi- 

 ognomy of plants and animals, the azure of the sky, the form 

 of the clouds, and the transparency of the atmosphere, still it 

 cannot be denied that it is the vegetable covering of the 

 earth's surface which chiefly conduces to the effect. The 

 animal organism is deficient in mass, while the mobility of 

 its individual members and often their diminutiveness remove 

 them from the sphere of our observation. Vegetable forms, 

 on the other hand, act on the imagination by their enduring 

 magnitude for here massive size is indicative of age, and 

 in the vegetable kingdom alone are age and the manifestation 

 of an ever-renewed vigour linked together. The colossal 

 Dragon Tree (12), which I saw in the Canary Isles, and which 

 measured more than sixteen feet in diameter, still bears, as it 

 then did, the blossoms and fruit of perpetual "youth. When 

 the French adventurers, the Bethencourts, conquered these 

 Fortunate Isles in the beginning of the fifteenth century, the 

 Dragon Tree of Orotava, regarded by the natives with a 

 veneration equal to that bestowed on the olive tree of the 

 Acropolis at Athens, or the elm at Ephesus, was of the same 

 colossal magnitude as at present. In the tropics a grove of 

 Hymenea3 and Cesalpiniae is probably a memorial of more 

 than a thousand years. 



On taking one general view of the different phanerogamic 

 species which have already been collected into our herbariums 

 (13), and which may now be estimated at considerably more 

 than 80,000, we find that this prodigious quantity presents 

 some few forms to which most of the others may be referred. 

 In determining those forms, on whose individual beauty, dis- 

 tribution, and grouping, the physiognomy of a country's 

 vegetation depends, we must not ground our opinion (as from 

 other causes is necessarily the case in botanical systems) on 

 the smaller organs of propagation, that is, the blossoms and 

 fruit; but must be guided solely by those elements of mag- 



