Of flavour, or of scent in fruit or flower,
Or what lie views of beautiful or grand
In Nature—from the broad majestic oak
To the gi-een blade, that twinkles in the sun.
Prompts with remembrance of a present God.
His presence, who made all so fair, perceived,
Makes all still fairer.”
The hotaiiist finds speculations for the truest philosophy in
what he used to tread without refiection under his feet. He
begins to see how admirably plants are adapted to every kind
of soil and situation, so as to leave no spot absolutely uncovered.
He perceives, perhaps, with all the vividness of a
first impression, that
“ The bleakest rock upon the loneliest heath
Feels in its barrenness some touch of spring;
And in the April dew and beam of May,
Its moss and lichen freshen and revive !”
He finds the most exposed rocks, rearing their lichen vegetation,
scarcely to be distinguished without a magnifier, from
the surface on which they grow. The trunks of living D-ees
are never without their parasites, and often exhibit a miniature
botanic garden of mosses and l i c h e n s t h e most rapid
and the most sluggish streams—the pure and ice-cold rivulet
of the Alps, down to the turbid canal of the plains—the crysta
l lake and the stagnant pool, nay, the very liot-baths of
Switzerland and the volcanic Geysers of Iceland, swarm with
their peculiar vegetation. The fiat and dreary shores of the
icy sea, presenting every where a level and marshy prospect,
are densely carpeted with numerous mosses, which, though
frozen from season to season, revive and fiourisli during then-
short-lived summer. The decay of one plant furnishes au
immediate and proper nutriment for thousands of minute
tribes, and the tru n k of a dead tree gives birth to millions.
We know th a t we cannot keep our bread many days without
finding its cavities garnished with blue mould, shewn by the
microscope to he composed of myriads «5f perfect and beautiful
plants. So likewise with the surface of our cheeses, which
not only produce the blue mould—so esteemed by many—
hut several otlier species of m i n u t e o f a wliite, red, or
yellow colour.
To proceed, however, to the subject more immediately before
us,—but to whicli, it is hoped, the preceding observations
form no inappropriate introduction,—we find tlie vegetation
of the Ocean no less conspicuous for beauty and variety of
form, than splendour of colour; admirably fitted for the
place it is designed to occupy, and of direct utility to mankind.
The marine Alga is no longer the Alga imitilis. Viewing
these tribes in the most careless way—as a system of subaqueous
vegetation, or even in a merely picturesque light
—we sec the depths of ocean shadowed with submarine
groves, often of vast extent, intermixed with meadows, as
it were, of the most lively Imes; while the trunks of the
larger species, like the giant-trees of the tropics, are loaded
with innumerable minute kinds, as fine as silk, or transparent
as a membrane. Nor must we forget, that, while thousands
and tens of thousands of quadrupeds, birds, and insects, depend
upon the vegetation immediately surrounding us for
their very existence, a countless host of creatures derive p rotection
and nourishment from the plants of the Deep, appropriated
to their use by that merciful P o w e r in whom they
live, move, and have their being—whose goodness is over all
his works. Some of the Alga, placed on account of the simplicity
of their structure a t the bottom of the scale, are so
small as to be invisible to the naked eye, except hy the appearance
they give to other species on which they happen to
he parasitic in prodigious numbers. Such are Achnanthes bre-
vipes and unipunctata, figured in the Cryptogamic Flora.
From these microscopic forms. Alga are found of all sizes on
our own shores, up to thirty or even forty feet in length, an
extent to which Chorda Filum not unfrequently attains.
This plant resembles an enormous piece of catgut, and is, in
fact, known hy the name of Sea-catgut in Orkney, while, in
Shetland, it goes hy the name of Lucky Minny's Lines, and,
in England, of Sea-lace. L i g h t f o o t mentions, that the
fronds, skinned when half-dry, and twisted, acquire so considerable
a degree of strength and toughness, that the Highb