2 VEGETABLE SUBSTANCES. 



sure and opportunity for cultivating the social and 

 kindly affections. It is not until men have placed 

 themselves beyond that state of merely physical ex- 

 istence wherein the plenty of to-day may be followed 

 by the destitution of to-morrow, that the higher fac- 

 ulties and feelings of our nature can be expanded. 

 It must certainly, therefore, be matter of more than 

 common interest to obtain some knowledge of those 

 vegetable substances through the cultivation of which 

 man has been enabled to localize himself, to reap and 

 to store up harvests; and by thus becoming freed 

 from an incessant call upon his physical energies for 

 the supply of his necessities, to acquire the motives 

 and the means for becoming something higher and 

 better in the scale of being. 



Vegetables form the primary source of sustenance 

 to everything that lives. Were the earth without 

 them and bare and but for cultivation how much 

 of it would be in that state the effects of heat and 

 cold, of drought and rain, would be so violent, that 

 apart from all considerations as to food, the whole 

 world would speedily become uninhabitable. Frosts 

 and drought would break, and the returning water 

 would wash away the surface, until the whole would 

 become one wide and swampy waste. The presence 

 of vegetation prevents this desolating action, and 

 converts what otherwise would be destructive agents, 

 into ministers of abundance. No vegetable produc- 

 tions tend so much to bring about this beneficial 

 result as those which are cultivated for human food. 

 By the shade which they afford to the ground in the 

 hot season, they check that evaporation, and prevent 

 that excessive hardening of the surface, which, in an 

 exposed wild, render the soil impervious and inert; 

 while, on the other hand, the humidity which they 

 imbibe during the rainy season is again given out by 

 continual and gradual evaporation, and they minister 



