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Show ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 363 two volumes with colored drawings. Some species of Rhexia and Malastoma ascend in the Andes, as alpine or Paramos shrubs, as high as nine and ten thousand five hundred (about 9600 and 11,190 English) feet : among these are Rhexia cernua, R. stricta, Melastoma obscurum, M. aspergillare, and M. lutescens. (33) p. 244.-"Laurel-form." To this form belong the genera of Laurus and Persea, the Ocotere so numerous in South America, and (on account of physiognomic resemblance) Calophyllum, and the superb aspiring Mammea, from among the Guttiferre. (34) p. 244.-"How interesting and instructive to the landscape paintm· would be a work which should present to the eye the leading forms of vegetation." In order to define somewhat more distinctly what is here only briefly alluded to, I permit myself to introduce some considerations taken from a sketch of the history of landscape painting, and of a graphical representation of the physiognomy of plants, which I have given in the second volume of Cosmos (bd. ii. s. 88-90; English edit. vol. ii. pp. 86-87). "All that belongs to the expression of human emotion, and to the beauty of the human form, has attained perhaps its highest perfection in the northern temperate zone, under the skies of Italy and Greece. By the combined exercise of imitative art and of creative imagination, the artist has derived the types of historical painting at once from the depths of his own mind, and from the contemplation of other beings of his own race. Landscape painting, though no merely imitative art, has, it may be said, a more material substratum and a more terrestrial domain : it requires a greater mass and variety of distinct impressions, which the niind must receive within itself, fertilize by its own powers, and reproduce visibly as a free work of art. Hence landscape painting must be a result at once of a deep and comprehensive reception of the visible spectacle of external nature, and of this inward process of the mind." "Nature, in every region of the earth, is indeed a reflex of the whole: the forms of organized beings are repeated everywhere in |
