A CHAT ABOUT PLANTS. 141 



The very sand of the sea, dry and drifting at the mercy 

 of the waves, fickle and false to a proverb, is not too 

 poor for a most useful plant, the so-called sand-reed. It 

 has no beauty of form to please the eye, no delicacy of 

 structure to engage our attention, the cattle themselves 

 will not touch it. But when planted by the hand of man, 

 to give firmness to dykes and embankments, it pierces 

 them with an entangled web of living structure, which 

 offers a resistance stronger than that of the gigantic walls 

 of fabled Cyclops, and is but rarely overcome by the 

 violence of the storm and the fury of the waves. The 

 loose sand of South American deserts still harbors little 

 cacti, so small, and so slightly rooted in their unstable 

 home, that they get between the toes of the Indian and 

 even the fearful deserts of Africa, those huge seas of sand 

 without a shadow, are at least surrounded by forest shores, 

 clothed in perpetual verdure ; even in their midst a few 

 solitary palm-trees, sighing in loneliness for the sweet rivu- 

 lets of the oasis, are scattered over the awful solitude, 

 and wherever a tiny thread of water passes half con- 

 cealed through the endless waves of sand, a line of lux- 

 uriant green, marks it to the exhausted traveller, and 

 reminds him of the green pasture and still waters of 

 Holy Writ. 



Nor are plants dwellers upon land only : the waters also 

 teem with vegetable life, and the bed of the mighty ocean 

 is planted with immense submarine forests and a thousand 

 varied herbs, from the gigantic fucus, which grows to the 

 length of many hundred feet, and far exceeds the height 

 of the tallest tree known, to the little yellow blossom 



