PHYSIOGNOMY OF PLANTS. 231 



the South Indian Archipelago, the flower of the Rafflesia 

 is nearly three feet in diameter, and weighs above fourteen 

 pounds. 



The extraordinary height to which not only individual 

 mountains but even whole districts rise in tropical regions, 

 and the consequent cold of such elevations, affords the inha- 

 bitant of the tropics a singular spectacle. For besides his 

 own palms and bananas, he is surrounded by those vegetable 

 forms which would seem to belong solely to northern latitudes. 

 Cypresses, pines, and oaks, barberry shrubs and alders (nearly 

 allied to our own species) cover the mountain plains of 

 Southern Mexico and the chain of the Andes at the equator. 

 Thus nature has permitted the native of the torrid zone to 

 behold all the vegetable forms of the earth without quitting 

 his own clime, even as are revealed to him the luminous 

 worlds which spangle the firmament from pole to pole (37). 



These and many other of the enjoyments which nature 

 affords are denied to the nations of the North. Many constel- 

 lations and many vegetable forms, including more especially 

 the most beautiful productions of the earth (palms, tree-ferns, 

 bananas, arborescent grasses, and delicately feathered mi- 

 mosas), remain for ever unknown to them; for the puny 

 plants pent up in our hothouses, give but a faint idea of the 

 majestic vegetation of the tropics. But the rich development 

 of our language, the glowing fancy of the poet, and the 

 imitative art of the painter, afford us abundant compensation ; 

 and enable the imagination to depict in vivid colours the 

 images of an exotic Nature. In the frigid North, amid barren 

 heaths, the solitary student may appropriate all that has been 

 discovered in the most remote regions of the earth, and thus 

 create within himself a world as free and imperishable as 

 the sprit from which it emanates. 



