lapse of ages might have aspired to the dignity of a tree; a nucleus around which other trees might have clustered. Here and there, indeed, amid the heaving waste, a desolate, wind-shaken, flame-blackened oak rears its naked branches in the distance; but it is a stricken thing, and only confirms the position assumed. From a concurrence of fortuitous circumstances easily conceived, the solitary seed was received into a genial soil; the tender shrub and the sapling were protected from destruction, and at length it had struggled into the upper air, and defied alike the flames and blasts of the prairie. The argument of _analogy_ for the _natural origin_ of the prairie may also be fairly questioned, since careful examination of the subject must convince any unprejudiced mind that the similarity of feature between these plains and others with which we are acquainted is not sufficiently striking to warrant comparison. The _pampas_, the _steppes_, and the _sand-plains_, though not unlike in the more prominent characteristics, are yet widely different {97} in configuration, extent, and soil. The prairie combines characteristics of each, exhibiting features of all in _common_, of no one in _particular_. Who would institute comparison between the dark-rolling luxuriance of the North American prairie, and the gloomy moor of Northern Europe, with its heavy, funereal mantle of heather and _ling_. Could the rifest fancy conjure up the _weird sisters_, all "so withered and so wild in their attire," upon these beautiful plains of the departed Illini! Nor do we meet in the thyme-breathing downs of "merry England," the broad rich levels of France, the grape-clad highlands of Spain, or in the golden mellowness of the Italian _Campagna_, with a similitude of feature sufficiently striking to identify our own glorious prairies with them. Europe can boast, indeed, no peculiarity of surface assuming like configuration or exhibiting like phenomena.