1849.] 



exercised by Trees on Climate. 



443 



nessed a similar phenomenon when late!}' climbing to the tops of the 

 Peter Botte mountain there. At dawn of da}', he says, we snatched 

 a hasty breakfast and were fairly on the move by six o'clock. Our 

 route lay up a steep ravine at the lower part of which grows a deiise 

 forest of ebony and " bols de natte" through which we made our 

 way and soon got completely wet through from the dripping of the 

 dew from the branches of the trees and long grass.* 



There is one more means by which the vegetable world collects 

 the moisture of the atmosphere, viz. by forming dew. Although the 

 advantage a climate derives from this is not so apparent, yet the 

 supply obtained is by no means scanty or devoid of utility, for it 

 assists in the nourishment of the plant and enables it to supply the 

 ^vants of man with its fruits and to scent the air with the fragrance 

 of its flowers. When it is mentioned that the quantity of dew de- 

 posited during the year in Britain is reckoned at five inches, 

 (half the quantity of the rain, which fell in 1838 at Bellary,) the 

 agreeable freshness such a quantity of moisture will cause when 

 again becoming vapour will readily be comprehended. The quan- 

 tity of moisture taken up by the atmosphere during the day very 

 much influences the quantity of dew which falls at night. Dew is 

 first deposited on the bodies, which radiate heat most powerfully as 

 grass, twigs, and leaves of trees ; some trees however, are even fa- 

 mous for the quantity of water they collect from dews which hang- 

 about them, and there is not, perhaps, among all the numerous ex- 

 amples that occur of the provident economy of nature in the vegeta- 

 ble world, a more remarkable instance than that displayed in a plant 

 commonly met with in Cejdon and other islands of the east, and 

 which has obtained the appropriate name of the pitcher plant. 



Being the inhabitant of tropical climates, and found on the most 

 dry and stony situations, nature has furnished it with the means of 

 obtaining an ample supply of moisture without which it would have 

 withered and perished. To the footstalk of each leaf near the base 

 is attached a kind of bag, shaped like a pitcher, of the same consist- 

 ence and color as the leaf in the early stage of its growth, but chang- 

 ing with age to a reddish purple. It is girt round with an oblique 

 band or hoop and covered with a lid neatly fltted and moveable on a 



* Eecent ascent of the Peter Botte Mountain, by Mr, Hayter, Illustrated Londois. 

 News, p. 142, 2d September, 1848. 



VOL. XT. KO. XXXYI. I A 



