this latter account the Pimpernel has been called the poor man's weather glass; and the great Linnæus observing certain plants close their leaves and flowers at certain hours in the evening, and open them as regularly at fixed hours in the morning, formed a botanical clock, by which he was enabled to know the time of day.

All plants, however different in structure, are composed of solid and fluid parts; and in their structure generally exhibit a fibrous and hard mechanism, which gives support to the other organs. There are three principal kinds of vessels in vegetables,-the sap vessels, which are in the wood; the air vessels, which are composed of single threads wound into a sort of spiral tube; and the peculiar vessels of each plant which contain the milky, resinous, and other fluids which characterise the plant.

Plants bear in several respects a close resemblance to animal existence. They live and grow, although they cannot move. They choose and reject food, although they have no mouth-their whole surface being in some respects mouth and stomach. They breathe, though they have no lungs-the leaves exercising that function; and perspire, as in the sun-flower, &c. most abundantly They have a circulation, though they have no heart. They sleep; are benumbed by cold, and restored by warmth; killed by frost, by poison, or by absence of food; grow ' plethoric by superabundance, and become more vigorous by stimulants. During the whole period of their existence they are liable to injury, disease, and death; and after death they are subjected to decay and decomposition.

2. Yellow Goats'-beard opens at 4 o'clock, and closes at noon.

WEST INDIES.

English and French Islands.

THE West Indies are an extensive cluster of islands, lying between the coast of Florida in the north, and the river Orinoco on the continent of South America; the Bahama islands being the most northern, and Trinidad the most southern.

Not many years after the discovery of the West India islands, by Columbus, the largest and finest of them were taken possession of by the Spanish government. The Indians were a gentle race, and were easily 'subjugated. The Spaniards did not seem to regard them as human beings, but rather as wild animals, who were to be 'exterminated. They shot them down by thousands, and even trained bloodhounds to pursue them.

In this way, the numerous islanders who once swarmed like bees upon every hill-side and in every valley of these beautiful regions, were reduced to a very small number. Most of these were treated like slaves, and many of them were 'compelled to work in mines, where they soon perished from hard labour to which they were unaccustomed, and for the want of that free air which Heaven had sent them before the Europeans came to 'deprive them of it. By degrees, the native West Indians vanished, and their fair lands came into the possession of various 3 European governments.

2

Cuba is the largest of the 'islands. It stretches through a space of nearly 750 miles, but varies in breadth from 70 to 130 miles.

Saint Domingo, or as it is now called, the Republic of

2. Called Caribs and Arrowauks.

1. Vide Root. 3. Spain seized Cuba and Porto Rico; France, St. Domingo, Martinique, and Guadaloupe; England, Jamaica, Bermudas, Barbadoes, &c. The Dutch, Danes, and others, obtained some of the smaller islands. 4. These islands have no winter, being within the tropics;

the seasons are divided into wet and dry.

Hayti, is the second in size of the West India islands. It is about 400 miles long, and 150 broad. Port au Prince is the seat of government. St. Domingo is the oldest city built by Europeans in the new world. It was founded in 1498, by Bartholomew Columbus.

1

This island formerly consisted of two colonies, a French one, which occupied the western part of the island, and a Spanish one, which occupied the eastern part. In 1792 the slaves of the French colony, who constituted eleventwelfths of the population, ' revolted against their masters, and finally made themselves an independent nation. In 1822, Boyer, then president of this part of the island, marched on the Spanish portion, the republican flag was hoisted, and the slaves were 'emancipated.

Jamaica is the most important and valuable of the British West India islands. It was first discovered by Columbus, during his second voyage in 1494. In 1509, a Spanish colony was established. The island was next taken by Cromwell in 1655, and since that period it has been held by the British.

The white inhabitants of the West Indies are Creoles, Spanish, English, French, and Germans. The mixed races are numerous, and the negroes most numerous of all. The Indians are extinct, except a mixed race of Caribbees found in St. Vincent. The English islands are now happily freed from the curse of slavery.

GEOGRAPHICAL.-Area 93,300 square miles. Population three millious.

Write the names of the groups into which the West Indian islands are divided. What are the principal islands of the Bahamas;-Windward islands and Leeward islands?

What are the principal towns in the three islands of Cuba, St. Domingo or Hayti, and Jamaica?

CHRONOLOGICAL.—Cat island, or St. Salvador, one of the Bahamas, discovered 1492. Subsequently the Spaniards discovered and possessed Cuba, Porto Rico, and Marga

rita; England, Jamaica, Barbadoes, St. Christopher's, Antigua, Barbuda, Anguilla, Dominica, St. Vincent, Granada, Tobago, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Nevis, and Montserrat; France, Martinique, Guadaloupe, Deseada, and Marigalante; Holland, St. Eustatia, and Curaçou; Sweden, St. Bartholomew; Denmark,St. Croix and St. Thomas.

VEGETABLE PHYSIOLOGY.

Roots.

PLANTS, like animals, feed upon the food designed and furnished by Divine Providence for their nourishment.

There is, however, one very remarkable difference with respect to the feeding of plants and animals, necessary to be taken into account in all inquiries on the subject; namely, the circumstance that animals can travel about (even the sluggish oyster can shift its position on its native rock) in search of food; and when it becomes scanty or fails in one place, it can remove to another. Not so the plant, which is rooted in a particular spot, and cannot move, whatever may be the state of the supply of food, a supply which may and does fail in numerous instances.

Now the means which are provided for plants to 'obviate the deficiency of food arising out of the circumstances just mentioned, furnish some very interesting facts and inferences.

One of these means may be observed, in what are termed creeping plants, such as the strawberry and sweet violet. As soon as a root of any such plant is established, either from seed, or from an off-set planted, or from a runner 1 spontaneously fixing itself, it begins to feed on the plantfood of the soil, and at the same time to fill the soil with rejections; and consequently while it exhausts the food on the one hand, it deteriorates it on the other. The whole plant seems to feel this, and as soon as it is felt, the means provided for obviating the disadvantageous circumstances, come into operation.

The root itself cannot remove of its own accord from the spot; but shoots immediately spring and go off in all directions around the root in quest of fresh soil, at a distance from that which has been exhausted and con

taminated by the original root, giving as plain an indication as if it were written in words at length, that the mother plant wishes to escape from the soil, and that the Creator has made an indispensable and admirable provision for the purpose. It strongly proves the correctness of this view of the matter, that the older the plants are, or in other terms, the longer they have stood in the same spot of ground, the greater number of runners they will send off.

Roots are necessary to plants, to fix and hold them in the earth, from which they imbibe nourishment.

Roots are either 1annual, or living for one season, as in barley; 'biennial, which survive one winter, and after perfecting their seed, perish at the end of the following summer, as wheat; or 1perennial, which remain and produce blossoms for an indefinite number of years, as those of trees and shrubs in general.

The root consists of two parts, the cauder and the 'radicula. The 'cauder, or stump, is the body or knob of the root, from which the trunk and branches ascend, and the fibrous roots descend. The radicula is the fibrous part of the root branching from the caudex.

Roots are:-1. Fibrous, or consisting entirely of fibres, as in many grasses and herbaceous plants. 2. Creeping, or having a subterraneous stem, spreading horizontally in the ground, and throwing out numerous fibres, as in mint and couch-grass. 3. Spindle-shaped, as in the radish and carrot, which produce numerous fibres for the absorption of nutriment. 4. Stumped, or apparently bitten of, as in the primrose. 5. Tuberous, or knobbed, as in the potato, which consists of fleshy knobs, connected by common stalks or fibres. 6. Bulbous, as in the crocus. 7. Granulated, or having a cluster of little bulbs, or scales, connected by a common fibre, as in the saxifrage.

1

1. Vide Root.