A CHAT ABOUT PLANTS. 145 



of their own, and even in the thick-ribbed ice of the 

 Antarctic seas, marine plants have been found floating. 



Heat deters plants as little as cold ; the fiery furnace 

 of volcanoes is tapestried with confervse, and hot springs, 

 whose breath is certain destruction to animal life, water 

 the roots of plants, which bear beautiful blossoms. There 

 are springs in Louisiana whose temperature is 145 F., 

 and yet not only mosses, but shrubs and trees are seen 

 to bathe their roots in their boiling waters. In the Fu- 

 marole, on the fairy island of Ischia, near Naples, a sedge 

 and a fern grow in the midst of ascending vapors, and 

 in a soil so hot that it instantly burns the hand which 

 attempts to touch their roots ! Nay, in the very geysers 

 of Iceland, which boil an egg in a few minutes, a small 

 plant grows, blossoms, and reproduces itself annually. 



If land and water abound thus with vegetable life, the 

 realms of the air are not less well peopled, at least with 

 germs and seeds of plants; they float upon every breeze, 

 are wafted up and down the heavens, and round and about 

 our great mother earth. Nothing is more startling, more 

 wonderful, than the almost omnipresence of fungus germs 

 in the atmosphere. A morsel of ripe fruit left exposed to 

 the air, affords at once ample evidence of this teeming, 

 living world around us. In a very short time, a delicate, 

 velvet-like covering envelopes the decomposing mass, and 

 presently acquires the utmost luxuriance of growth. And 

 a wonderful race are these fungi, the earth's vegetable 

 scavengers ; called upon by the mysterious distribution of 

 duties in nature, to destroy all decaying matter, and to 

 absorb noisome exhalations, they grow with a rapidity that 

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