the tender seeds which were put into the ground, did not germinate, but were frozen. Accordingly, the indigenous shrubs of America, instead of extending their roots perpendicularly, spread them over the horizontal surface, thus avoiding, as it were instinctively, the internal frost which is destructive to them.
This degree of cold was equally sensible in the impressions of the air, since, on a comparison of the most exact experiments, a difference of twenty degrees may be established between the climate of the old world and that of the new, the heat being as sensible in America at forty degrees of the equator, as it is at sixty in Europe.
This disposition of the atmosphere must necessarily have had an influence on the productions and animals of the new world. Between its tropics there did not exist any of the large quadrupeds; and naturalists, adverting to this circumstance, have suspected that the seeds could not develop themselves in a climate so unfavourable to the principal organizations of the animal kingdom:— a conjecture which derives support from the sensible degeneration suffered by all the animals imported from Europe, insomuch that, at the commencement, serious apprehensions were entertained that their races would be gradually extinguished[1]
- ↑ This observation is drawn from Bertrand's Natural and Political History of Pennsylvania, but does not apply to the present circumstances of South America, in many of the cultivated parts of which the breeds of the domestic animals imported from Europe, are said rather to have improved, than to have degenerated. With a view to the illustration of this point, in Plate IV. the overseer of a royal Peruvian mine is introduced on horseback, as represented in the descriptive painting of an Indian festival.
