Page:Aspects of nature in different lands and different climates; with scientific elucidations (IA b29329668 0002).pdf/24

 feel himself differently affected in the dark shade of the beech, on hills crowned with scattered fir-trees, or on the turfy pasture, where the wind rustles in the trembling foliage of the birch? These trees of our native land have often suggested or recalled to our minds images and thoughts, either of a melancholy, of a grave and elevating, or of a cheerful character. The influence of the physical on the moral world,—that reciprocal and mysterious action and reaction of the material and the immaterial,—gives to the study of nature, when regarded from higher points of view, a peculiar charm, still too little recognised.

But if the characteristic aspect of different portions of the earth's surface depends conjointly on all external phenomena,—if the contours of the mountains, the physiognomy of plants and animals, the azure of the sky, the form of the clouds, and the transparency of the atmosphere, all combine in forming that general impression which is the result of the whole, yet it cannot be denied that the vegetable covering with which the whole earth is adorned is the principal element in the impression. Animal forms are deficient in mass, and the individual power of motion which animals possess, as well as often the smallness of their size, withdraw them from our sight. The vegetable forms, on the contrary, produce a greater effect by their magnitude and by their constant presence. The age of trees is marked by their size, and the union of age with the manifestation of constantly renewed vigour is a charm peculiar to the vegetable kingdom. The gigantic Dragon-tree of Orotava,[12] (as sacred in the eyes of the inhabitants of the Canaries as