Universal Geography Volume 1; Or, a Description of All Parts of the World, on a New Plan, According to the Great Natural Divisions of the Globe (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1829 Excerpt: ...tho ridges of the great continents, and thus forms, as it were, a belt to the globe? Playfair's Illustrations of the Huttonian theory of the earth. Edinburgh, 1802. f See Book fii. p. 83, of this work. BOOK XX. Continuation of the Theonj of Geography. Of the Earth, considered as the residence of organic beings. SECTION I. OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OP VEGETABLES. We have decomposed tho terrestrial globe into its solid, liquid, and aeriform parts. Let us now proceed to the consideration of those innumerable beings which exhibit the spectacle of life upon every point of the globe; which embellish its surface, which feed upon its inexhaustible stores of nutricious juices, and which, by one common destiny, find in it a thousand different graves. These productions, and these inhabitants of the earth, are not scattered over it by the hand of blind chance; general laws have assigned to each class of these organic beings its cradle and its grave; and these laws it becomes us to study before we commence the description of the different parts of the world. Vegetables, from the abundance in which they are produced, and from their intimate connection with the soil, claim the first rank. It is for the botanist to examine in detail the treasures of the vegetable kingdom; the business of the physical geographer is only to mark its general arrangements; and here he finds abundant reason to admire that wisdom which presides over the constitution of the globe. inauence or The temperature of the air appears to form the only physical limits to alwnTcget tue extension of vegetable nature. The scale of atmospherical heat serves accordingly as tho ordinary scale for the progress of vegetation. Hence, under the burning climate of the torrid zone, we have only to ascend tho m...