Page:Aspects of nature in different lands and different climates; with scientific elucidations (IA b29329668 0002).pdf/222

 little raised above the level of the sea, or whether it changes rapidly in ascending in an almost vertical direction the steep declivities of mountain-chains. Organic nature gives to each zone of the earth a peculiar physiognomy; but where the solid crust of the earth appears unclothed by vegetation, inorganic nature imparts no such distinctive character. The same kinds of rocks, associated in groups, appear in either hemisphere, from the equator to the poles. In a remote island, surrounded by exotic vegetation, beneath a sky where his accustomed stars no longer shine, the voyager often recognises with joy the argillaceous schists of his birth-place, and the rocks familiar to his eye in his native land.

This absence of any dependence of geological relations on the present constitution of climates does not preclude or even diminish the salutary influence of numerous observations made in distant regions on the advance and progress of geological science, though it imparts to this progress something of a peculiar direction. Every expedition enriches natural history with new species or new genera of plants and animals: there are thus presented to us sometimes forms which connect themselves with previously long known types, and thus permit us to trace and contemplate in its perfection the really regular though apparently broken or interrupted network of organic forms: at other times shapes which appear isolated,—either surviving remnants of extinct genera or orders, or otherwise members of still undiscovered groups, stimulating afresh the spirit of research and expectation. The examination of the solid crust of the globe does not, indeed, unfold to us such diversity and va