ON VEGETABLE PHYSIOLOGY. 



sixth degrees, two thousand eight hundred. In 

 Jamacia, between the seventeenth and nineteenth 

 degrees, four thousand. And in Madagascar, 

 situated between the thirteenth and twenty-fourth 

 degrees under the tropic of Capricorn, more than 

 five thousand." 



I must now trespass a few minutes more on 

 your time, while I claim your indulgent hearing 

 to some concluding observations upon the uses 

 to which nature has applied this fascinating por- 

 tion of her wonderful works. 



The vegetable kingdom may be considered 

 one of the principal instruments by which Provi- 

 dence keeps in union the several parts of the 

 natural world, and promotes its respective opera- 

 tions. Without it, the earth, from a deficiency of 

 covering, would soon lose its texture; and its 

 integral parts being exposed, its aggregation 

 would be disjointed and destroyed by the ope- 

 ration of the other elements. The atmosphere, 

 whose purity and elasticity, as we more than 

 once have observed, depend upon vegetable eva- 

 poration, would no longer preserve animal life, 

 or by its pressure keep in due place the minuter 

 parts of which the crust of the globe is composed; 

 while the various animals, many of them of vast 

 magnitude and powers that now may be con- 

 sidered graminivorous, would become beasts of 

 prey, that would soon depopulate the world, and 

 with the other causes, render it a mass of chaos 



