NO vulgar error has perhaps longer

prevailed among men, than that of the permanency and immutability of our globe. The peace in which our mother earth seems to slumber, is but an illusion in all nature nothing is ever at rest. The moon around the earth, the earth around the sun, that sun around another great centre, and all the heavenly bodies in one unbroken circle around the throne of the Almighty-all are in restless motion, treading their path in the great world of the Lord and praising his name in never-ceasing anthems.

But even at home, our own great mother Earth is not, as many still believe, at rest, and its very foundations are every now and then giving signs of the mysterious life which is throbbing in this vast globe. Meteoric stones, also, come like aerial messengers from distant, unknown spheres, and speak loudly of the life in spaces unknown to human vision. For stones travel as well as life-endowed organic bodies; they are, in fact, the very oldest travellers on earth of whom we have any knowledge. The mountains are not everlasting, and the sea is not eternal. Thousands of years ago, rocks began to shiver in the tierce cold of the Polar regions; even Sweden and Norway, Greenland and Spitzbergen became intolerable, and they set out on their great journey to the warmer South. But huge, unwieldy travellers as they were, they soon tired and rested awhile in the wide, sandy wastes which stretch through Northern Europe and Asia. Some, the large ones, remained there, bleak, blasted masses of rock, sterile and stern, like grim giants of dark, old ages. Their lighter companions, smaller and swifter, rolled merrily on towards the foot of mountains, and there they also lie, scattered over the plains of Europe and Siberia. Science calls them "erratic" stones, the people know them as "foundlings," for there they are, like lost children, belonging to another climate and a different race from those which surround them. When they travelled, man knows not. It must have been in times of yore, however, when the great Northern Ocean covered yet with its dark waves, mountain and forest in the very Leart of the continent. Other blocks travelled against their will, packed up in

snow and ice. Whole islands of ice, we know, were torn off by terrible convulsions from the coasts of Scandinavia; the storm-tossed sea hurled them into her powerful currents, and thus they were carried southward, bearing on their broad shoulders huge masses of rock that had rolled down from their native mountains. These gigantic guests from the North soon stranded against the mountains of the continent; they melted under a more genial sun, and their burden fell to the ground. When, afterwards, the bottom of this vast sea rose and became dry land, these foreign visitors also rose and found themselves, with amazement, in a southern country, under a southern sun. Thus it is that the famous statue of Peter the Great which adorns one of the magnificent open squares of his city, was hewn out of Swedish granite-the same stone from the far North which furnished the colossal vase before the Museum in Berlin.

How long ago these early travels were made by rock and stone, we know not; but they are by no means at an end. The same process is still going on, even now. The Arctic still sends her children out to dwell in warmer climes, and year after year sees wandering stones come from high, icy regions, and tumble into the Atlantic, or strand on the low shore at the mouth of the St. Lawrence. the bottom of the sea on the banks of Newfoundland is ever to see the sweet light of heaven, it will be found strewn with mighty rocks from Greenland, and our children's children may yet erect a monument to the great father of our country, hewn out of Greenland stone.

If

Other rocks are sea-born. Lofty mountains, now capped with snow and wrapped in clouds, bear unmistakable evidence that they once dwelt at the very bottom of the ocean. Sandstone blocks, piled up high until they form large mountain chains, on which gigantic trees are deeply rooted, and the birds of heaven dwell, to whose summit men painfully climb to look down upon the sunny plain, were once mere loose, fragile sand down in the deeps of the sea. They are still mixed with countless shells, the bones of fishes, and a thousand relics of their former home. On the other hand, we know that large tracks of sea-bottom once belonged to the firm

"The land where the lemon-tree blows, In darker leaves bowered the gold orange glows," for Seville oranges and lemons came to Europe only through the Arabs. The latter are not even found on the walls of Pompeii, and the common orange, which is a Chinese by birth, was brought to Europe first by bold Portuguese sailors.

In Europe, these fruits lingered a while, were remodelled from their first rough shape, developed and refined, and then sent, ennobled in shape and quality, across the broad Atlantic. Here they have rapidly spread from State to State, and are even now on their way, through California, back to their original home. The day may not be far distant, when the youthful Union, which has already given grain back to starving Ireland, and loads the tables of the rich with the finest apples the world knows, may send its grapes and unsurpassed nectarines to ancient Persia, from whence Europe received the hard, unflavored peach. Strange it is, that as Europe has never returned any similar gifts for the many presents it has received from the East, so America also has given to Europe nothing in return for her many kindnesses. For the whole rich blessing of our grain harvest; for the wholesome rice, the profitable cotton; for sugar and spice, oranges and pomegranates, all of which we owe to the Old World, we have sent back but two rather equivocal gifts. For smokers alone will be disposed to think the introduction of tobacco a real, valuable present. A plant which affords no edible root, fruit, or other nutritious part, distinguished neither by beauty nor by sweet odor; but, on the contrary, by a disagreeable sinell and taste, which produces, when eaten, nausea, vomiting and giddiness, and is, in large quantities or concentrated, even deadly poison-such a plant is surely at least a doubtful gift. So it is with the potato, which has long been considered by its enthusiastic admirers an incomparably rich gift of the West to the East, but which now might easily be looked upon as the fatal fruit marking in the aunals of history the first decline of European nations.

But even tobacco is not accepted as a Western gift by all botanists. Although it is said that the Spaniards found it used in Mexico medicinally, especially in the treatment of wounds, and saw it smoked there, as the English did in Virginia, still it was certainly known as

early as 1601 in Java and China, and there is good reason to believe at an even earlier date in China. Now, as tobacco did not reach Europe before 1559, when it was first used in Portugal-and, consequently, in Europe-as medicine, it may at least have been known in Eastern Asia long before the discovery of America. Nature, moreover, seems almost desirous to avenge the unnatural movement from West to East by the rapid degeneration which marks the culture of both these vegetables in Europe. But even if maize really came from this Continent first, if the Indian fig and the closely related agave, which now grow wild around the Mediterranean, and add so much to its picturesque scenery, have their true home in the New World, these two plants would still be the only ones that have ever travelled eastward, single and isolated exceptions to the great law of Nature, that plants, animals and men, all must travel towards the setting sun.

This mysterious but undeniable movement is still going on. It proceeds, even in our day, on a grand and imposing scale, and essentially alters, from time to time, the vegetable character of whole countries, as they are newly discovered or newly settled. It shows us in indelible signs the silent, irresistible force with which humble plants prescribe their path on earth to both the animals that feed us and the different races of men. For such is the strange relation between plants and Man: they are of paramount importance for his existence not only, but also for his welfare. It is little to say that they feed and clothe him, and that they enable him to sustain the life of those animals, from whom he receives in return not only food and comfort, but, what is incomparably more valuable, service, affection, and grati tude! The cerealia have become the first, and most binding social tie between men, because their culture and preparation require vast labor and mutual service. As no society, moreover, can exist without laws, it may well be said, that these short-lived grasses are in truth the first cause of all legislation. Not without good reason, then, was it that the Romans called their Ceres not only a goddess, but also a legislator.

To the careless observer, animals seem to be as permanent features in Nature as plants. Apparently the same sparrow picks up grains of wheat in the harvestfield that robbed our cherries in early