After making these allowances, we may safely arrive at the following conclusions. Among the trees which gave the Neapolitan landscape its character were then (as now) the stone-pine and the cypress. The former is frequently represented, with its peculiar branchless stems and cloud-like head—the product not only of close planting but of actual pruning in nurseries, as may now be noticed in the neighbourhood of Naples. This tree was cultivated for its edible nuts; and pine cones have been found among the charred objects in the shops of Pompeii. The beautiful cypress often occurs in the Pompeian frescoes, not unfrequently mingled with the pine, and gracefully combining with the outlines of the fanciful villas and temples represented. It is Gilpin, we think, who points out the peculiar adaptation, by contrast, of the spiral cypress and poplar to the long horizontal lines of southern buildings; while the square masses of the lime and elm combine well with the pointed Gothic. The “_Pinus halepensis_,” adds Schouw (the common maritime pine of Italy), is also found in these pictures. The vine, of course, occurs constantly—so does the olive. They were, no doubt, as universal then as now; and preferred respectively, as they do now, the volcanic and the calcareous hills in the vicinity of Naples. Preserved olives were found in Pompeii, which even retained something of their taste. The myrtle, and the beautiful oleander, or laurel-rose, as the French call it—common shrubs of to-day—also appear in the frescoes. Add to these the laurel and bay tribe, the ilex, fig, pomegranate, the “arundo donax” or gigantic reed—cultivated then as now for its various uses, and covering the marshy grounds with its dense brake, strange to the northern eye, are most of them recognisable also in these pictures. And we are enabled to say that the common vegetable forms on which the eye of the Pompeian citizen rested were, to this extent, similar to those on which his descendant gazes now. But there were many species, now common, then rare or unknown, some of which are mentioned by Schouw in the little essay before us; others, we are able to add, from different sources. The aloe or agave, and the Indian fig (figue de Barbarie, as the French call it), are now among the familiar plants of maritime Italy. The former vigorously protrudes itself in every stony, solitary spot, from the old ramparts of Genoa to the lava-fields of Aeta; the latter is half-cultivated in a careless sort of way for its luscious bulb; and the two seem, in many places, to have almost extirpated the older vegetation. Both of these lusty children of the South are of quite modern origin in Italy, having come over from America. Some have fancied that the pineapple is represented in one Pompeian fresco. “But this,” says our Professor, “is undoubtedly the edible crown of a young dwarf palm, or _chamærops humilis_.”