grandeur are now not only become scarce in his country, but it is difficult to ascertain with accuracy their real character. The mighty æsculus, for example, the noblest denizen of Latian forests, which formed of itself great woods, “lata æsculeta,” is a mere puzzle for antiquarian botanists: no one knows what it was, and there may be some question whether it has not disappeared from the face of earth, or whether it survives only in some nearly extinct variety of oak.[5] Man has doubtless done much towards the effecting of this change, the more valuable plants of the south having been gradually introduced, and the indigenous woods cleared for their reception; but Nature has done much of herself. In the remaining woodland districts of maritime Italy—such as the Maremme of Tuscany and the Latian Campagna—the evergreen species seem to be gradually supplanting the deciduous, the foreign the indigenous. We talk familiarly of the hardy vegetation of the North; but, where the two meet on conditions of climate endurable by both, the children of the tropical sun seem to show the greater hardihood, and to come out survivors in the great battle for existence. Their every aspect, their rough bark and leathery leaves, seem indicative of a stronger vitality than that which animates the more majestic but more delicate structure of the leafy giants of the northern temperate zone. A similar law—if the analogy does not appear too fanciful—seems to govern the migrations of trees and shrubs, and of the human family itself. The North produces the races of more commanding aspect: it sends them forth conquering and to conquer; they establish empires, they subjugate the so-called feebler races of the South; but, in the midst of their conquests, they sicken and perish, and become extinct. The children of the South gradually penetrate northwards, and by their own more prolific multiplication, as well as by crossing or intermixture, in which their more essentially vigorous nature attains predominance, they efface the type of the Northern race, and cause it ultimately to disappear. What has become of the descendants of those hordes which swarmed from the populous North, in the decline of the Roman Empire, over all the regions adjacent to the Mediterranean? They have vanished, or are scarcely recognised by antiquaries in a few problematical instances, where small insulated communities, thought to be of Teutonic or Gothic origin, maintain a precarious existence among the descendants of their former subjects. Where are the historical Gauls, with their tall figures, their fleshy frames, their golden hair, and eyes of truculent blue? A few of them, possibly, to be found in Flanders; but anything less like the Gaul of antiquity than the sinewy, nervous, agile, undersized, brown-skinned, and black-haired biped, who now inhabits some eighty out of the eighty-five departments of France, can hardly be imagined. What is become even of the purer Northern breed