Of the Ivy— f This saves many animals from want and death in Autumn and Spring. In October it blooms 
in profusion ; and its flowers become an universal banquet to the insect race. The great black fly, Musca 
grossa, and its numerous tribe, with multitudes of small winged creatures, resort to them: also, those 
beautiful animals, the latest birth of the year, the Admiral and Peacock Butterflies. In its honey, it yields 
a constant supply of food till the frosts of November. In Spring, in the bitter months of March and 
April, when the wild products of the field are nearly consumed, the Ivy ripens its berries; and almost 
entirely constitutes the food of the Missel-Thrush, the Wood- Pigeon, and other birds/ Knapp’s Journ. 
of a Naturalist, p. 66, 86. 
While most of our Plants thus form the sustenance and banquet of the animated kingdom, other classes 
of them were made and meant to be its natural Medicines and secret physicians. For this purpose, those 
which thus benefit, are universally dispersed. We may regard many of these as useless weeds, yet they 
silently spread amid all vegetation, to be every where ready for the general benefit. Brutes often need 
them as much as ourselves, and are repeatedly seen at particular times to select and crop the herbs that 
they do not use for food, but to which some recollected experience, or unexplainable perception or instinct, 
leads them, for their resulting efficiencies. Some of these useful plants are also so interspersed with their 
daily sustenance, that they cannot take the one without also digesting the other. But to man, Plants have 
been in all ages the natural and the earliest and the most universal physicians. The metallic and mineral 
drugs of our modern pharmacopoeias have not been above three centuries in their sanitary use. Vegetable 
medicines constituted the physic of our ancestors, as they still are of all nations who do not make Euro- 
pean science their predominating guide. 
When we consider that Vegetation carpets all the surface of our Globe; and that its shrubs and forests 
still occupy the largest portion of its superficial extent; and when we find that it is universally, by day and 
by night, streaming from its verdure — from every leaf, fruit, and flower — an aerial fluid of some sort or 
other, and in the lower region of the atmosphere immediately over our heads, and mixing in the gaseous 
strata of it which we breathe. 
It is agreed that in the day time plants imbibe from the atmosphere carbonic acid gas; decompose it; 
absorb the carbon, and emit the oxygen. In the dark, they give out carbon and absorb oxygen, but in far 
less proportion. Smith Int. Bot. 212-13. . . . They appear also to decompose the moisture they receive, 
and to effuse the oxygen. 
Some plants differ in what they exhale. M. Candolle found that some Mushrooms exposed to the 
Sun, under water, yielded 70 per cent, of hydrogen gas; others, in the Sun, in six hours, gave out 42 
hydrogen and 56 nitrogen; others, in ten hours, 55 hydrogen and 44 nitrogen. In darkness, this emission 
ceased. It seems to be a general rule, that the green parts of vegetables are always giving out oxygen gas 
in light. 
Gruithuisen thinks that plants have themselves produced their carbonic acid. Bull. Univ. 1830, p. 163. 
The leaves and bark of the Pimento exhale aromatic particles or gas so inflammable, that the growers allow 
no fire to be made near them. 
We shall then perceive that it must be hourly causing the most important effects, additions, and 
changes in the air which we inhale, and must be a very essential and active agent on the vitality, functions, 
and powers, of our material frame. The atmosphere could not be what it is, in that portion of its expanse 
which rests immediately on our inhabited surface, unless Vegetation was around us. The powerful effects 
of its presence we feel in various parts, in the diseases which it occasions. 
These are well known in the Tropical countries amid their luxuriant vegetations; and in all marshy 
districts; and especially in the malaria produced by moisture occurring to decayed vegetation, which is 
more fatal, when sea and fresh water combine to overflow it. 
From these we may form some notion of its extensive influence, in a minor degree, both for good and 
for ill, in every other locality. That it has constantly an exciting and exhilarating and salubrious effect, 
we all experience when we pass from a plant-less city into a plant-abounding country. Strength and spirits 
arise within us, as we reach the abode and diffusion of the Vegetable Kingdom. The eye and mind are not 
only animated and delighted by its beauty and quietude and gracefulness, diversified figures and colours; 
and by their harmless playfulness as the breeze flutters among them — but the body feels a new vigour, and 
its functions new energies, by some invisible agency, of which we soon become strongly sensible; and 
whose gradual operation, our reviving health, where it has been lapsing, so often gratefully acknowledges.* 
Turner’s Sacred History. 
