One of the greatest features of interest to the scientific botanist, and even to the less instructed lover of nature, which Italy presents, consists in the circumstance that the northern and southern types of vegetation—to speak more closely, the northern-temperate and the sub-tropical—meet together, especially in its warmer regions, in stronger contrast than probably anywhere else. The same remark is true, no doubt, of the Mediterranean shores in general: but those of France and of Turkey approach more to the general northern aspect; those of Barbary to the tropical: in favoured Italy the two types seem sometimes to blend and sometimes to contrast in ever-changing and ever-striking variety. The same was doubtless, to some extent, the case in ancient times. But the northern character was probably far more prevalent than now. The early Greek settlers landed on a forest region, where the common deciduous trees of the north, now driven back to the scantily clothed gorges of the central Apennines, flourished in great abundance. Such a nature as this may still be observed in the few forest patches left in the higher Abruzzi, the Sila of Calabria, and so forth. “The beech-forest,” says Schouw, “is called the symbol of the Danish character. But I have wandered in Calabria through large and beautiful beech-woods, on the higher plateaux of the Apennines, where the vegetation as well as the bracing air constantly reminded me of my home.” Probably the wild shores of Corsica, or those of Dalmatia, with their shaggy growth of northern forest and their undergrowth of mixed northern and Mediterranean shrubs, present an aspect more resembling what the followers of Ulysses and Æneas beheld when they landed, than may elsewhere be found. We may notice historical traces of the continued existence of this ruder and fresher nature, not only in the agricultural writers of the Romans, who speak far more of deciduous trees than of the evergreen, now deemed so characteristic of Italy, but in the well-known pages of Virgil. There is not in general much of “local colour” in the ‘Eclogues’ and ‘Georgics:’ that is a poetical artifice of later day. But what there is, represents the physiognomy, not of the Lombard plains where he was born, but of the neighbourhood of Naples in which he lived. His sea-sand is “black,” not brown or yellow, like that of all other bards,—the volcanic sand of the bays of Baiæ and Naples—very coal-dust in appearance. When he recommends the farmer to place his hives near a tree, for the bees to swarm on, it is a “palm-tree, or huge oleaster”—advice which he might as well have tendered to a Scythian as to a _colonus_ of his native Mantua. Now, the general idea which the verses of Virgil convey of the region with which he is concerned, is that of a sylvan country—not, emphatically, the “land of the cypress and myrtle,” but of the oak, ash, linden, wych-elm, beech, citizens of the great Transalpine forests. Some of the trees of which he celebrates the