OF PLANTS. 261 



SKETCH OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE MOST IMPORTANT 

 OF THE PLANTS YIELDING FOOD. 



There is not one region among the foregoing which has 

 not been compelled to deliver up some of its inhabitants for 

 the decoration of our pleasure-grounds, or to the service of 

 Science in our Botanic Gardens; and although we are 

 obliged to afford artificial warmth in winter to those from 

 the proper tropical kingdoms of Martius, Jacquin, Adanson, 

 Reinwardt, and Roxburgh, and even to protect them from 

 the unpropitious climate in the summer, yet there remains 

 a great number of plants from all parts of the earth, and 

 the mountain plants, at least, from the tropics, which when 

 cultivated by us in the open air, seem to corroborate the 

 proposition, that Man is, in this respect, lord of Creation, 

 and that howsoever Nature may have arranged the vege- 

 table carpet of the earth, he has the power to alter this 

 arrangement according to his liking, and, above all, for his 

 service. But it is not so; and the facts on which the 

 statement is founded are but illusory when we look, not at 

 a little spot of earth like a Botanical Garden, but at culti- 

 vation on a large scale, which alone is really of importance. 

 Here Man again reassumes his character of a helpless 

 creature ; his activity in ploughing and manuring is but an 

 insignificant aid to the prosperity of cultivated plants, to 

 which climatal variations prescribe as distinct ranges of 

 distribution as to the wild Flora, and which the favourable 

 or unfavourable influence of a season brings to luxuriant 

 development or destroys. All over the globe has Man, for 

 the supply of necessary food, selected almost solely summer 

 plants, that is, such plants as complete their whole vegeta- 



