A lecture on the geography of plants / By John Barton.

  • John Barton
Date:
1827
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A lecture on the geography of plants / By John Barton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    106/120 (page 92)
    sugar-plantations, coffee, and cotton. At a height of from five to nine thousand feet above the level of the sea are found most of the culti- vated productions of the temperate zone, Wheat, Barley, Oats, and the fruit-trees of Europe *. At this altitude, where, in our lati- tudes, the inclemency of the climate scarcely admits of the habitation of man, are placed some of the principal cities of Spanish America. The elevated plains of New Spain, New Gra- nada, and Peru, on which those cities are built, are even better peopled and better cultivated than the lower regions of the Orinoco, the Amazons, and the Rio de la Plata. It is in this elevated district that the Wax Palm grows, which would form a noble ornament if it could be introduced into our shrubberies, rearing its plumed head above every other tree; and it does not seem impossible that such an attempt might succeed, since the Scarlet Fuchsia, a native of the same chain of mountains, endures the winter here in the open air, though exposed to a degree of cold unknown in its native cli- mate. There seems to be in many plants an extraordinary power of accommodating them- selves to different situations. If two seeds of the same species be sown, one in a sheltered, Humboldt: Geographie der Pflanzen.