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ourselves been entrusted with the safety of our crops, we should not have 
failed to place them on great trees; but in this, as well as in every thing 
else, we are bound to admire Divine Providence, and to mistrust our own 
wisdom. Had our harvests been the produce of the forests, in the event of 
these being destroyed by war, or set on fire through our own imprudence, 
or rooted up by the winds, or ravaged by inundations, whole ages would 
have been requisite to reproduce them in a country. Farther, the fruits of 
trees are much more liable to drop off than the seeds of grasses. The 
grasses, as has been already observed, carry their flowers in an ear, in many 
cases surmounted by little beards, which do not defend their seeds from the 
birds, as Cicero says, but which serve, as so many little roofs, to shelter them 
from the water which falls from heaven. The drops of the rain cannot 
drown them, as they do flowers radiated, in disks, in roses, and in umbels, 
the forms of which, however, are adapted to certain places and to certain 
seasons; but those of the grasses are adapted to every exposure. 
When they are borne in flowing and drooping plumes, such as those of 
most grasses of hot countries, they are sheltered from the heat of the sun; 
and when collected into an ear, as those of most grasses of cold countries, 
they concentrate his rays on at least one side. Farther, by the suppleness 
of their stems, strengthened by joints from distance to distance, and by their 
filiform and capiliaceous leaves, they escape the violence of the winds. 
Their weakness avails them more than strength does the great trees. 
They farther resist the effect of excessive dryness by the length of their 
roots, which go, in quest of moisture, a great way under ground; and 
though their leaves are narrow, they have them in such numbers, that they 
cover the face of the ground with foliage endlessly multiplied. At the 
slightest shower, you see them all rear themselves into the air at their 
extremities, as if they were so many claws. They even resist conflagration, 
which consumes so many trees in the forest. 1 have seen countries in 
which they every year set the herbage on fire, in the season of drought, 
recover themselves, as soon as it rained, with the most lovely verdure. 
Though this fire be so active, as frequently to devour, root and branch, the 
trees which come into contact with it, the roots of herbage sustain no injury 
from it. 
It is in this cosmopolite family, if I may be allowed the expression, that 
Nature has placed the principal aliment of man; for the various species of 
corns, on which so many human tribes subsist, are only so many species of 
