Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1874 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV. FUNGI. ATURE is a perpetually revolving panorama. No sooner does she withdraw one object from our admiring gaze, than she immediately places another as interesting or as beautiful in its room. In watching the progress of vegetation especially, as month after month it unfolds before us, we are struck with the regularity with which each species of plant visits us in its own appointed time. So remarkably constant are the same plants to their appointed seasons, that their appearance might be regarded as a kind of floral calendar, indicating the various periods of the year. This regularity is not confined to the highest tribes of plants, but is equally observable in the very humblest. The smallest and most obscure tribes have some peculiar functions adapted to each period of the year. Though most of them are perennial, yet they are more luxuriant in some seasons than in others, and are particularly exact and exclusive as to their periods of reproduction. The hard and apparently lifeless lichen remains unchanged upon the rock for years, perhaps as long as the rock itself continues uncrumbled, but every year at the approach of winter, when the moist, stormy weather in which it delights prevails, its dormant suspended life revives, and when higher plants are hybernating, it begins to exercise the various functions of vitality. The bright silken tufts of the moss continue throughout the whole year to soften the rough harsh aspect of the wall and ruin, and to form velvet pads on the woodland walks to hush the fall of fairy feet, but in spring when 'a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast, and a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, ' it awakens under the ethereal influence of the universal feeling, clothes itself..