WOODS AND POEESTS. 113 



which forms a shelter for the various tribes of birds, monkeys, 

 and other animals, to whom it is a home of happiness and 

 plenty under every aspect the contemplation of nature's 

 clothing fills the mind with awe and admiration. 



There is hardly anything more refreshing to the mind 

 than the contemplation of trees and shrubs congregated into 

 a wood, the floor of which is carpeted with mosses and 

 flowers, where the gigantic and gnarled trunks of the 

 forest trees covered with many-coloured lichens starting up 

 all round, circumscribe the view, while the wide-spreading 

 boughs and the leafy canopy overhead exclude the sun's 

 rays. It is here that one views nature in her purest forms 

 and colours, untouched by the destroying hand of artificial 

 arrangement. 



The immense preponderance of the vegetable over the 

 animal world in quantity compensates somewhat for the 

 superior organisation and the intelligence of the latter, which 

 must be studied in the individual, while the vegetable world, 

 which can be contemplated in the mass, almost overwhelms 

 the imagination with its vastness. It is indeed impossible 

 to compute the amount of vegetation in the great forests of 

 America and Eussia (in which latter country are the largest 

 in the world), covering hundreds, nay 'thousands, of square 

 miles with one continuous growth of timber. That forest 

 in Eussia through which the river Pechora flows, extends 

 over a space of 150,000 square miles ! The whole mass of 

 animated existence sinks into insignificance when compared 

 in quantity with this ; and when to these forest-tracts are 

 added the thousands of square miles of grass and heaths 

 which grow in some climates with wonderful luxuriance, the 

 amount of the vegetable kingdom is at once placed beyond 

 all comparison with the animal kingdom in point of quantity. 

 Cooper, in his American novels, describes the prairies as 

 great seas of grass extending as far as the eye can reach, 

 and rising to a height of 8 or 10 feet ; and Humboldt 

 describes some of the grasses on the plains of the Oronoco, 

 as being so gigantic that they measure 18 feet from knot 

 to knot, and says the Indians use them for blow-pipes 

 to shoot their poisoned arrows from. And as though 



