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Show 358 PHYSIOGNOMY OF PLANTS. plants are assembled in masses and determine the aspect and character of the country. The New Continent does, indeed, also possess superb Alstromcrire and species of Pancratium, Hremanthus, and Crinum (we augmented the first-named of these genera by nine, and the second by three species); but these American Liliacere grow dispersed, and are less social than our European Iridere. (3°) p. 244.-" Willow .Form." Of the leading representative of this form, the Willow itself, 150 different species are already known. They are spread over theN orthern Hemisphere from the Equator to Lapland. They appear to increase in number and diversity of form between the 46th and 70th degrees of north latitude, and especially in the part of north of Europe where the configuration of the land has been so strikingly indented by early geological changes. Of Willows as tropical plants I am acquainted with ten or twelve species, which, like the willows of the Southern Hemisphere, are deserving of particular attention. As Nature seems as it were to take pleasure in multiplying certain forms of animals, for example, Anotidre (Lamellirostres) and Columbre, in all the zones of the earth; so are Willows, the different species of Pines, and Oaks, no less widely disseminated : the latter (oaks) being always alike in their fruit, though much diversified in the forms of their leaves. In Willows, the similarity of the foliage, of the ramification, and of the whole physiognomic appearance, in the most different climates, is unusually great-almost greater than even in Coniferre. In the southern part of the temperate zone of theN orthern Hemisphere, the number of species of willows decreases considerably, yet (according to the Flora atlantica of Desfontaines) Tunis has still a species of its own, resembling Salix caprea; and Egypt reckons, according to Forskal, five species, from the catkins of whose male flowers a medicine much employed in the East, Moie chalaf;{aqua salicis), is obtained by distillation. The Willow which I saw' in the Canaries is also, according to Leopold von Buch and Christian Smith, a peculiar species, common however to that group and to the Island of Madeira-S. canariensis. W allich' s Catalogue of the plants of N epaul, and of the Himalaya, cites from the Indian sub-tropical zone thirteen species, partly described by Don, Roxburgh, |
