Vegetable substances used for the food of man / [Edwin Lankester. Revised and partly rewritten].

  • Edwin Lankester
Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vegetable substances used for the food of man / [Edwin Lankester. Revised and partly rewritten]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    where hitherto the seasons have defied the labour of man, and have seemed to wage war upon his agriculture. This is the ease in some parts of India, in Southern Africa, and in a great part of what we yet know of Australia, where at one time the earth is parched up, and the beds of rivers become dry channels or uncon- nected pools, while at another they suddenly pour on- ward to the sea in a wide-spreading inundation, or roll their rapid floods in narrow but deepened channels. That the labours of cultivation exert the most beneficial effect upon climate may be shown by contrasting the waste and uncultivated parts of our own country with other parts in the same latitude, and at the same eleva- tion above the level of the sea, but which are in a state of high cultivation. In these, while the immediate ob- ject of providing a certain and abundant supply of food has been accomplished by the labours of man, an indi- rect influence has been exerted scarcely less beneficial, by rendering the country in general more healthy and agreeable. In the central parts of Scotland, where the introduc- tion of agricultural improvements has been much more recent than in England, but where, owing to causes whose investigation would be misplaced in these pages, their progress has been much more rapid, the change of climate has fully kept pace with those improvements. It is within the experience of persons still living, to have noticed that the snow., which in that country for- merly began to fall in November, was not wholly gone until the month of April ; while in the middle of summer the heat was so excessive that agricultural labourers were obliged to susjjend their toil during four or five hours in the middle of the day. At that time the au- tumnal rains frecpiently descended with so much violence that the cro])s, which had been retarded by the coldness of the spring, were jireventod from ripening on the high grounds, were lodged and rotted on lands that were lower, and swept away l>y the swelling of the streams over the holms and meadows. In the same spots, at the present day, the (juantity of snow which usually falls n 2
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