444 
VEGETATION OF 
The sensations of pleasure we experience on seeing 
natural objects, depends much upon association of ideas 
with their uses, their novelty, or their history. What 
causes the sensations we feel on gazing upon a waving 
field of golden corn? Not, surely, the mere beauty of 
the sight, but the associations we connect with it. We 
look on it as a national blessing, as the staff of life, as 
the most precious produce of the soil ; and this makes it 
beautiful in om* eyes. 
So, in the tropics, the broad-leaved banana, beautiful 
in itself, becomes doubly so, when looked upon as pro- 
ducing a greater quantity of food in a given time, and 
on a limited space, than any other plant. We take it as 
a type of the luxuriance of the tropics, — we look at its 
broad leaves, the produce of six months’ growth, — we 
think of its delicious and wholesome fruit : and all this 
is beauty, as we gaze upon it. 
In the same manner, a field of sugar-cane or an ex- 
tensive plantation of cotton produces similar sensations : 
we think of the thousands they will feed and clothe, 
and the thought clothes them with beauty. 
Palms too are subject to the same influence. They 
are elegant and graceful in themselves ; they are almost 
all useful to man ; they are associated with the bright- 
ness and warmth of the tropics : and thus they acquire 
an additional interest, a new beauty. 
To the naturalist everything in the tropics acquires 
this kind of interest, for some reason or another. One 
plant is a tropical form, and he examines it with curi- 
osity and delight. Another is allied to some well-known 
European species, and this too attracts his attention. 
