The Wonders of Vegetation

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Bread-Tree of Tahiti. CHAPTER III. THE BKEAIHFBUIT-TKEE. WE will commence this portion of our task by mentioning certain extraordinary plants, which in countries essentially different from our own in soil and climate, are made use of by the natives to supply those wants which are supplied among us by means...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Bread-Tree of Tahiti. CHAPTER III. THE BKEAIHFBUIT-TKEE. WE will commence this portion of our task by mentioning certain extraordinary plants, which in countries essentially different from our own in soil and climate, are made use of by the natives to supply those wants which are supplied among us by means of certain domestic animals, or by mechanical contrivances, put into daily operation. There is one remarkable family in the kingdom of Flora, of which some members furnish leavened bread, others a supply of milk, equal to the best cow-milk, and still others the most fearful poison as yet known to man. The useful members are the bread-fruit-tree, the milk-tree, and those which supply limpid water or some strengthening beverage to the traveller. As bread is the staff of life, we will give the place of honor to a fig-tree, which actually grows bread for our antipodes in Oceanica, and thus renders unnecessary the toils of the sower, the reaper, the miller, and the baker. The ancients loved to consider Nature as an individual being, apart from the world, endowed with reason and will, and constantly spoke of her in prose and poetry as the Universal Mother, and she well deserves this beautiful name, by her conduct toward all living things, and especially by the motherly affection with which she provides for the numberless children to whom she is incessantly opening the gates of existence. For what else are the rays of the sun calling forth life upon the hill-slopes; the rain falling softly on meadow and prairie, and even the warm carpet of snow which winter spreads over the frozen earth; the dew of morning and the vapory mists of evening ?what are they but so many evidences of the tenderness of our mother Nature?or rather the watchfulness of Divine Providence. But...