294 THE HISTORY OF 



this inheritance ? If he shall have to render an account of 

 it, it is to be feared that here, as everywhere, it will go hard 

 with him. 



If we inquire for what Purpose is the Vegetable world, 

 the parti-coloured carpet of the earth, intended, we find a 

 three-fold answer. The meanest purpose, is undoubtedly, 

 to serve the common necessities of mankind, their nourish- 

 ment and handicrafts, in a word their Economy. I call it 

 the meanest, because Nature here merely satisfies for each 

 individual, what, be they ever so refined and glossed over 

 by cultivation, are but animal requirements. The import 

 of the vegetable world for the regulation of the numerous 

 and comprehensive physical processes of the earth, appears 

 indeed more lofty. The glow of the African desert, its 

 dry rainlessness, and the fulness of life in primeval forests 

 with their torrents of rain, obtain their peculiar characters 

 through the vegetable world. Moisture and dryness of the 

 atmosphere, warmth and cold of the soil, uniformity or 

 rude variability of climate and the like, above all the life of 

 Animals, and finally of Man in the mass, have their con- 

 ditions in the luxuriance and the nature of vegetation. 

 This import of vegetable life does not relate to the solitary, 

 miserable individual, but to whole countries and regions, to 

 many successive generations, the possibility and facilities 

 for whose existence are intimately bound up with the 

 formation of the vegetable world as a Whole. Lastly, there 

 is a third face, which the world of Plants may turn towards 

 us, without question the noblest and the most exalted. It 

 is, like all Nature, the symbol of the Eternal ; behind this 

 play of dead natural forces and their products, we adore a 

 Holy Author and Sustainer. The Vegetable Creation is 

 the rich altar-cloth of the temple of God, in which the 



