ABOUT THE WEATHER. 1 2? 



the plants, since the vegetable feeders are directly, the 

 Carnivora indirectly connected with determinate forma- 

 tions of plants. So that heat and cold are not the 

 only consequences of the position of the sun in regard 

 to the earth, but also the whole life existent thereon : 

 the action of its mightiest forces in the raging hurricane, 

 which hurls four-and-twenty pounders through the air,* 

 to the invisible labour of the most minute Infusorium ; the 

 roar of the Chilian Pine, and the low whisper of the nor- 

 thern Birch, from the roar of the lion, the slayer of the gazelle, 

 even to the pipe of the mouse-hunting screech owl, whose 

 discordant note the awakened sleeper's superstition interprets 

 as " komm mit, Jcomm mit" (come with me.) The fox and 

 tiger point to the barn-door fowl and the giraffe, these 

 to Barley fields and Acacia groves, these again to the 

 corresponding zones of Europe and to the glowing 

 savannahs of Africa. On the sun depend not only 

 vitality and motion, but also the first arrangement, 

 and its shining rays are the pencils with which it paints 

 the light and shade, the glowing yellow of the arid 

 sand, the cool green of the moist meadow, with which it 

 lays down the geography of plants and animals upon the 

 surface of the earth, and even sketches the design of an 

 ethnographic chart of the human race. 



And when we look beneath into the internal con- 

 nection when we perceive that all the elements pre- 

 vailing over the rest, perhaps nowhere appear so irre- 

 gular and abnormal as in our Europe, while a part of 

 the tropical regions intelligibly expresses every funda- 

 mental law, when we thus find the thing which causes 



* Report of General Baudrand on the hurricane at Guadaloupe, 

 on the 25th of July, 1825. 



