VOICES FROM THE WOODLANDS. 



to reflect, it may be, the hues of that bright arch which 

 now spans the valley in its glorious beauty. 



Have you not read that, in ancient times, our giant 

 brother, the Sphagnum palustre, or grey bog-moss, usurped, 

 with his dense compact tufts and leaves of intense green, 

 a vast range of desert country, now covered with corn-fields 

 and cottages, with green meadows and groups of cattle; and 

 that, as time went on and changes were wrought by war or 

 storms, that same moss underwent a strange metamorphosis, 

 and passed into a substance which is called peat, inter- 

 mediate between his past condition and half-formed coal ? 

 Travellers will tell you, that the same substance, composed 

 of all such vegetables as grow best in watery places, occurs 

 in the southern hemisphere; but with this difference, that 

 none of our tribe enter into the composition of South 

 American peat, not even in the swampy parts of that 

 portion which is drained by the river La Plata, on the east 

 side of South America, nor in the island of Chiloe to the 

 west. The same unerring law which restricts the calceolaria 



