botanical investigator, Robert Brown; and Central and South America distribute their vegetable riches into eight more regions, which are dedicated to Jacquin, Bonpland, Humboldt, Ruiz and Pavon, Swartz, Martius, St. Hilaire, and D’Urville; among these, Jacquin’s region is remarkable for its strange cacti; Humboldt’s, on the heights of the South American Andes, for its Quinoa forests; and that of Martius, in the interior of Brazil, for its abundance of palms, for its quantity of climbing plants or lianes and parasitic plants. All over the globe has man, for the supply of necessary food, selected almost solely summer plants, that is, such plants as complete their whole vegetative processes, or, at all events, the development of all the parts containing nutrient matter, within the course of a few months. By this means he has rendered himself independent in the half-tropical regions of the evil action of the dry season, and in the higher latitudes of the destructive influence of cold, and thus ensured the possibility of cultivating plants, which there must be killed by the drought of summer, here by the cold of winter. Setting aside the cultivation of fruits, which serve rather pleasure than necessity, there remain but three arborescent vegetables in the whole world which can be included among the true food-plants, namely, the bread-fruit, the cocoanut, and the date, which actually furnish the chief proportion of the food of great bodies of men and over widely extended areas, and thence have become objects of culture; the _Cycadaceæ_, and sago-palms, on account of their starchy parenchyma, can at most perhaps be taken into our reckoning only in a very limited circle in the East Indies. All the rest of the food-plants are either such as possess a subterraneous, usually tuberous stem, which sends up shoots above the soil, persisting but a few months, on which develop flowers and fruit, while during the remaining time sleeping, as it were, beneath the protecting coverlet of earth, it sets the disfavor of the climate at defiance, or such as die during or at the end of a short period of vegetation, and ensure the future reproduction in the slumbering germ of the seed. To the former belong, for instance, the potato, derived from the Cordilleras of Chili, Peru, and Mexico; to the latter, almost all our corn-plants.