204 AFFINITIES AND GEOGRAPHICAL 



serve so faithfully. A signal superiority, however, belongs 

 to him as the centre and apex of all ; the undoubted king and 

 lord of this portion of animated nature. His greatness con- 

 sidering him merely as a unit in the animal kingdom lies 

 primarily in the concentration of qualities which he derives 

 from this situation. He is not an animal solely herbivorous, 

 or solely carnivorous ; solely innocent, or solely destructive. 

 He has all these characters and habits, with the addition 

 of others proper to his own family of being. There is great 

 virtue in this principle of concentration, or, as it may rather 

 be called, this universality of character. We see that an in- 

 tensity of it marks all the greatest individuals of our species, 

 such as Shakspeare and Scott, of whom it has been observed 

 that they must have possessed within themselves, not only the 

 poet, but the warrior, the statesman, the philosopher, and the 

 man of affairs, and who, moreover, appear to have had the mild 

 and manly, the moral and impulsive parts of our nature, in 

 the finest balance. 



When the naturalists of modern times began to inquire 

 into the geographical distribution of plants and animals, they 

 quickly found that the prevalent notion of their dispersion 

 from one common centre was untenable. From facts ob- 

 served by them, they have latterly concluded that, so far 

 from this being the case, there are many provinces of the 

 earth's surface occupied by plants and animals almost wholly pe- 

 culiar, and which must accordingly have had a separate origin. 

 Professor Henslow, of Cambridge, speaks of no fewer than 

 forty-five such provinces for the vegetable kingdom alone. 



A botanical or zoological province is generally isolated in 

 some manner, either as an island in the midst of a wide 

 ocean as, for example, St. Helena or the Isle de Bourbon 

 or as a portion of a continent separated from the rest either 

 by a range of high mountains, or by the boundaries of a 

 climate. It is also found that elevation of position comes to 

 the same effect with regard to vegetation as advance in lati- 

 tude ; so that, as we ascend a lofty mountain in a tropical 

 country, we gradually pass through zones exhibiting the 



