Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. FRAGRANCE. Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits ; camphire, with spikenard, spikenard and saffron ; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense ; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices."—Solomon's Song, iv. 13, 14. all man's sources of enjoyment, none display more clearly the bountifulness of God than the fragrant odours of nature. The world might have been made entirely scentless, and yet every essential purpose have been fulfilled. The vegetable kingdom, which is the great storehouse of perfumes, might have performed all its functions, and yet not a single plant exhaled an agreeable odour. Fragrance seems so wholly superfluous and accidental, that we cannot but infer that it was imparted to the objects which possess it, not for their own sakes, but for our gratification. We regard it as a peculiar blessing, sent to us directly from the hand of our heavenly Father; and we are the more confirmed in this idea by the fact that the human period is the principal epoch of fragrant plants. Geologists inform us that ail the eras of the earth's history previous to the Upper Miocene were destitute of perfumes. Forests of club- mosses and ferns hid in their sombre bosom no bright- eyed floweret, and shed from their verdant boughs no scented richness on the passing breeze. Palms and cycads, though ushering in the dawn of a brighter floral day, produced no perfume-breathing blossoms. It is only when we come to the periods immediately antecedent to the human that we meet with an odoriferous flora. God placed man in a sweet-scented garden as his home. He adorned it with labiate flowers, modest in form and sober in hue, but exhaling a rich aromatic fragrance at every pore. And so widely and lavishly did He distribute this class of p...