represented in these paintings will give, as far as they go, the measure of those which were familiar to the ancient eye, and will help to show the identities and the differences between the vegetation of the Campanian plains a hundred years after Christ, and that which adorns them now.” We propose to follow the Professor through this confined but elegant little chapter of his investigations. But by restraining ourselves to this alone, we should be dealing with only part of a subject. In most regions, two thousand years have made considerable changes in the appearance of the vegetable covering of the earth; but in that land of volcanic influences in which Pompeii stood, great revolutions have taken place, during that time, in the structure of the ground itself. Sea and land have changed places; mountains have risen and sunk; the very outlines and main landmarks of the scene are other than what they were. Let us for a moment imagine ourselves gazing with Emperor Tiberius from his “specular height” on precipitous Capri, at that unequalled panorama of sea and land formed by the Gulf of Naples, as thence descried, and note in what respects the visible face of things has changed since he beheld it. The central object in his view, as in that of the modern observer, was Vesuvius, standing out a huge insulated mountain mass, unconformable with the other outlines of the landscape, and covered then, as now, with its broad mantle of dusky green. Then, as now, its volcanic soil was devoted to the cultivation of the vine. But in other respects its appearance was widely different. No slender, menacing column of smoke rose perpetually from its summit. Nor was it lurid, at night, with that red gleam of the slow river of fire, “A cui riluce Di Capri la marina E di Napoli il porto e Mergellina.” It was an extinct volcano, and had been so for unknown ages. Nor did it exhibit its present characteristic cone, nor probably its double top; Vesuvius and Somma were most likely one; and the deep half-moon-shaped ravine of the Atrio del Cavallo, which now divides them, is thought to be a relic of the ancient crater. That crater was a huge amphitheatrical depression, several miles in circuit, filled with pasture-lands and tangled woods. Spartacus and his servile army had used it not long before as a natural fortress. But this feature was scarcely visible to the spectator at Capri, opposite the mountain, to whom the summit must have appeared as a broad flat-topped ridge, in shape and height very similar to the Table Mountain at the Cape of Good Hope.