The first vegetation which covers a volcanic
mass, or a coral island, is composed of these
lowest forms; Melville Island is yet in greater
part covered by mosses — and Captain Ross in
his South Polar voyage, noticed a dreary island,
called by him New South Shetland, marked
with patches of mosses, struggling for
existence. They will grow where no other
vegetation can exist, and when they die they lay
the foundation of that good vegetable soil in
which, in a succession of epochs, higher and
more beautiful forms of vegetable life may find
suitable support. Because of the exceeding
lightness of these precious seeds, it is not
difficult to understand how they may travel
in currents of air many leagues over land and
water before they settle. On the twenty-
ninth of August, eighteen hundred and
thirty, a lichen suddenly appeared among a
plantation of pines in the neighbourhood of
Dresden, covering the leaves on the side next
the wind only; and at another time the sails
of a ship at sea, near Stockholm, were in an
instant covered also with a kind of lichen.
This appearance—only to be explained on
the supposition that the minute germs came
floating invisibly upon the breeze — is said to
be common in Persia, Armenia, and Tartary,
where the people eagerly eat such lichens,
saying that they come from heaven. If we
venture for a moment to imagine the
inexpressible number of spores which a year's
growth must give to the world, it is not too
much to say that they must be everywhere,
and from their size penetrate into every
place; even the stomachs and other parts of
animals. This circumstance has been made
the ground of a belief that the cholera might
be attributable to the inhaling of fungi, the
offspring of cesspools and other putrefying
masses. So various are opinions on the
origin and cause of that epidemic, that it is
impossible to speak confidently on any one
suggestion respecting it; but it is a matter of
fact that, on the last occasion of that disease
appearing among us, an immense quantity
of microscopic fungi were found in the air.
If they were like many of the larger examples
of the order, extremely poisonous, it at
least admits of being suggested, that those
living in places where dense clouds were
present, being in a state of body unable to
resist their deleterious action, died from
a form of poisoning. Mouldiness — the common
term for minute fungous growth — is often
found in such strange places as only the
general and invisible dissemination of their
spores can explain. Pots of jam and other
domestic articles which the housewife most
carefully ties up, often become the tracts
upon which enormous forests of little fungi
grow. They will grow also on the back of
the gold-fish, and indicate its speedy death.
Deslongchamps found mouldiness even in the
air-cells of the eider duck.

It may create surprise that confusion does
not follow from the planting of nature in
this lavish manner. If seeds are so
scattered and spread, how is it that everything
is not trying to grow everywhere, so that
nothing could grow anywhere? The reason
is, that each plant thrives subject to its own
conditions of soil, heat, and moisture. The
coltsfoot is a sign of clayey soil, the orchis of
a light one; the fern loves the damp, but a
little too much moisture destroys the cactus.
The latter is a grateful vegetation on hard,
barren places in the tropics, as the rockrose
and stonecrop are elsewhere. Rhododendrons
and heaths like only the softest heath-
mould. Every plant requires also a spot
suited to the character of its growth, and
without that cannot live; in many cases the
seed will not even germinate. An
uninformed gardener in the north of England,
who received a larch fir, native of cool
climates, and nursed it most carefully in a
hothouse, soon found that it became a mere
dry stick; it was cast upon the dunghill,
which proved much more to its inclinations:
there it soon began to grow again. Agriculturists
pay respect to this natural system
much to their pecuniary advantage; the
grasses popular with them they divide into
those suited to rich pastures, bogs, wet
meadows, and sandy places. We are
warranted in supposing that innumerable seeds of
many plants are continually deposited in every
spot, but that the surrounding circumstances
permit only a few of them to germinate. The
invariable rule of nature, for which we may
be thankful, seems to be expressed in that
form of words which has elsewhere passed
into a political proverb, "The right man in
the right place."

The chronicles of botany contain several
cogent illustrations of the universal presence
of seed. The decay of wheat was supposed
to result from a mouldiness which
supervened, until a microscopist detected on the
grains of living wheat spores of fungi,
evidently planted there against the day when
the grain, losing its own vitality, suffered the
spore to start into active life. It appears
that the fungus needs for its growth the
presence of decay, and that is the reason
of its appearing suddenly in any place, and
then as suddenly departing: it is a true
scavenger.

There is a fact, well known to countrymen,
that fields which have not been sown with
clover, and have never borne crops of it at any
time, may nevertheless be covered with it if
they be manured with lime, which, soon becoming
chalk, yields a soil in which all clover
delights. An old writer records a curious
instance of spontaneous growth, the evident
result of a favourable change of circumstances
acting on seed planted naturally. He
says that during the famine in fifteen
hundred and fifty-five, the seaside pea, an
English flower, but not very common,
appeared in such quantities near Dunwich in
Suffolk, as to supply the food market, and