CHAPTER II. 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM. 



1 2. WHEN we examine, however cursorily, the nature of the 

 Plants around us, we at once perceive that their growth and suc- 

 cession are regulated by certain laws. Thus we observe that all 

 have a period of life to which they are more or less closely limited. 

 Many of our commonest cultivated vegetables, the Corn, the 

 Beans, the Turnips of our fields, and many of the plants which 

 enrich our gardens with their flowers, live but for a single 

 summer ; springing up from seed, uprearing a lofty stem, 

 putting forth expanded and luxuriant foliage, unfolding gay 

 and numerous blossoms, and finally withering away and under- 

 going complete decay, in the course of a few months. In others, 

 on the contrary, the duration of life is so great that it seems to 

 be unlimited ; but there is good reason to believe, that the forest 

 trees, which lift their massive stems to the light of day through 

 a succession of many hundred years, have an appointed limit to 

 their lives as regular as that of man, varying, like his, in indi- 

 vidual cases, according to the circumstances of each. Every 

 plant, then, has a period allotted by the great Creator of all, for 

 its springing from seed, the unfolding of its leaves, the expansion 

 of its blossoms, and its subsequent death and decay ; but while 

 death is the lot of each generation that " cometh up and is 

 withered," the perpetuation of the race is accomplished by 

 another law, which provides for the production by each indi- 

 vidual, before its own dissolution, of the germs of new individuals, 

 from which plants may arise, that go through their allotted 

 period of life, and in their turn decay, after producing the germs 

 of a succeeding generation. 



