GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF PLANTS. 



557 



living in the palms, where, with mats coated with clay, they construct hearths for the 

 fires which are essential to their comfort. In other districts the palm-groves, says 

 Desfontaines, " being impervious to the sun's rays, afford a hospitable shade, both to man 

 and other animals, in a region which would otherwise be intolerable from the heat. 

 Under this natural shelter the orange, the lemon, the pomegranate, the olive, the almond, 

 and the vine, grow in wild luxuriance, producing, notwithstanding they are so shaded, 

 the most delicious fruit. And here, while the eyes are fed with the endless variety of 

 flowers which deck these sylvan scenes, the ears are at the same time ravished with the 

 melodious notes of numerous birds, which are attracted to these groves by the shade, and 

 the cool springs, and the food which they there find." The date, the cocoa-nut, and the 

 sago palm, are of vast importance to mankind, for the nourishing farinaceous food they 

 supply, and their extraordinary fecundity, which led to the assertion of Linnseus, that the 

 region of palms was the first country of the human race, and that man is essentially 

 palmivorous. The cocoa palm produces annually, during the greater part of a century, 

 100 of its large nuts, but the Seje palm of the Orinoco yields 8000 fruits at a crop. A 

 single spatha of the date palm, the broad sheathing leaf which incloses the flowers, 

 contains 12,000, while each spatha of another species, the Alfonsia Amygdalina, has 207,000 

 flowers, and the individual plant 600,000. The produce of the banana, or plantain, 

 another inhabitant of tropical climes, is still more enormous ; a plant which requires but 

 little cultivation, and is to immense numbers of the human race, what rice is to the 

 Hindoos, and wheat to the Europeans. According to a calculation of Humboldt, upon 

 the same space of ground, the weight of the yield in the case of bananas will be 44 times 

 that of potatoes, and 133 times that of wheat ! 



In thus proceeding through the vegetable kingdom from the pole to the equator, we 

 come to different productions as we descend from the frozen to the cold, the temperate, 

 the warm, and the hot regions ; but as a change of elevation has the same effect upon 

 climate as a change of latitude, the plants that are characteristic of the high latitudes 

 appear in succession upon the lofty mountains of those that are much lower. Tournefort 

 found the plants that are peculiar to Armenia at the foot of Mount Ararat ; above these 

 he met with those that are common in France ; at a still greater height he came to those 

 that grow in Sweden ; and towards the summit the vegetation of the polar regions 

 appeared. The Alps, Pyrenees, and Andes exhibit the same feature ; and hence it may 

 be regarded as a botanical axiom, that the flora of a mountainous country will be richer 

 than that of another of less diversified aspect in the same latitude. The table states some 

 interesting facts respecting vegetation on some of the mountains of the torrid and 

 temperate zones. The fathom is equal to 6'39453 English feet. 



