Page:A Physical and Topographical Sketch of the Mississippi Territory, Lower Louisiana, and a Part of West Florida.djvu/21

 merate trees among our best avenues to chronological truth, and that the corruscating rays of Darwin's genius have illuminated the subject of vegetation too profusely for us to rank them any longer among the senseless children of blind Nature's operations; but has assigned them to their proper place on the scale of creation, and has taught the lords of the universe to know that they are more closely allied to the humble vegetable than their ambition is wont to acknowledge. Darwin's genius, by investigating their economy, has placed them among the capax rationis; and Lavoisier has proven, that the vital principle in them depends on the same set of agents that give birth to it in the more elevated orders of animated nature. "Organization, sensation, spontaneous motion, and life, exist only at the surface of the earth, and in places exposed to light. We might affirm, that the flame of Prometheus's torch was the expression of a philosophical truth which did not escape the ancients. Without light, nature was lifeless, inanimate, and dead. A benevolent God, by producing light, has spread organization, sensation, and thought over the surface of the earth."

Twenty or thirty years ago, the lakes between Baton Rouge and the Natches were so intimately connected with each other, that the people used, in order to avoid the impetuous current of the Mississippi, to pass with their large row-boats from one to the other with facility; but now it would be impracticable,