62 MADEIRA METEOROLOGIC. PARTY. 



But the watery vapour so wanting there is found in 

 even superabundance on the very same continent's 

 eastern coasts, where the prevailing winds blow from the 

 sea upon the land, and the former is recruited by a warm 

 current from the equator. There, then, amongst the 

 forest trees of Queensland, or the grassy plains of the 

 Zulu country and the Transvaal, let agriculture, and 

 gardening, and populous settlements be carried to any 

 extent, in an almost steamy atmosphere, wherein plants 



D. Bell, and other good members of the South African Literary and Scien- 

 tific Institution. And the general resulting opinion seemed to be this, Man 

 can do a little in modifying the aridity of a climate and soil by growing trees, 

 and ought to be doing it much oftener and more extensively than he does ; 

 but on the whole, whenever, at least in the southern hemisphere, we see an 

 island or a coast-line eminently umbrageous with trees, in an atmosphere 

 superabundantly moist and rainy, the trees are the consequence, rather 

 than the cause, of that moisture. So that no tree-planting by all mankind 

 would ever make the coast of Peru (where the only plant found by Darwin, 

 along a length of 300 miles of it, was a lichen growing on the carcase of a 

 dead mule) to show a rainfall and a vegetation like that of the opposite side 

 of South America in the dense and damp forests of Rio de Janeiro. 



But the South African " Cape " was one of the dry countries to be im- 

 proved ; so with juvenile ardour I experimented myself, at my own cost, on 

 part of the Royal Observatory hill there, during ten years. Finding, first, 

 that transplanting, as at home, would not answer ; and that sowing seeds of 

 trees in the places where they were intended to stand, was the only plan for 

 success. Sowing them, too, in such abundance, that Nature had an oppor- 

 tunity of producing varieties suitable to the untoward situation, and they only 

 eventually survived. Second, complete success, on the very small scale on 

 which I worked, was only secured at last by putting up a windmill-pump and 

 lead pipes, and thereby raising water from a shallow marsh below, to the top 

 of the hill, whereon the experiments were conducted : though that may per- 

 haps be considered to be a begging of the original question. 



