scanty product of some other: this fact originates probably from the effects of atmospheric impulse, either directly upon vegetation, or upon the soil which produced the food collaterally, or upon both collectively. In a wet season, water appears to nourish plants, or to supply their requirements principally: in a dry one, nutriment must be obtained from the soil by means of the fibre of the root, and hence particles are imbibed chemically different; a dry or a drained soil, producing short and scanty herbage, will frequently improve the condition of cattle more than an adjoining meadow having a profusion of food, though probably no chemical analysis could indicate the difference. These periodical winds again, violent and distressing as they often prove, are yet unquestionably essential in the economy of nature: our two seasons, in which these commotions of the air most usually become manifest, are about the equinoxes of autumn and spring, periods which in many respects have a similarity with each other. In the autumn of our year, the foliage of trees and plants, &c., putrefy and decay; marshes and dull waters, clogged by their own products, stagnate, and discharge large portions of hydrogen, carbonic gas, &c., injurious and even fatal to animal existence: in summer all these baneful exhalations are neutralized and rendered wholesome by the vast quantities of oxygen, or vital air, discharged from vegetable foliage: but these agents of benefit, by the autumn, are no more—consequently the discharge of oxygen is suspended, but the production of unhealthy air increased by the additional decomposition of the season. To counteract this, is probably the business of the storms of wind and rain prevailing at this season, which, by agitating and dissipating the noxious airs, introduce fresh currents, and render the fluid we breathe salubrious. The same may be advanced in regard to spring: the whole decay of winter, having no neutralizing body to render it wholesome, requires some great influencing power to remove it. But all this is reasoning without actual evidence; a discursive license, from the fallibility of human judgment not often to be indulged in: yet we can so rarely perceive the purport of the movements of nature, that our conceptions, vague as they may be, are almost all that remain to us.