Mount PELION extends to the south-east of Ossa, and is one of the most beautiful mountains in the world: it is lovely and fertile up to its top; it is covered with chesnut-trees, and is probably the place from which they have spread over the world, for their nuts are called _nuces Castaneae_, from the town of Castanea on the Pagasaean gulf. Among the Greek botanists, Pelion is celebrated for its richness in medicinal plants, and for the variety of its trees. Previously to the present wretched state of the country, many large villages existed about mount Pelion; it was the happiest district; its inhabitants enjoyed great privileges, and as they were very industrious and under the special protection of the sultans to whom the district belonged as a fief, they were enabled to pay a large tribute, but lived in the interior quite undisturbed and without suffering any ill usage. Their excellent warehouses, which were known also to German merchants, are now entirely destroyed, although the inhabitants have not risen against the Porte. This is the physical outline of the mountains. Phthiotis is an entirely mountainous country between Othrys, the Euboean sea and the gulf of Iolcus; but the mountains are not high. The remaining part of Thessaly is not absolutely a plain, for the mountains rise gradually, and the country is intersected by ranges of hills. Thessaly has two gulfs, that near Thermopylae called Μαλιακός or Πυλαϊκός, and the Παγασητικός or Ἰωλκίτης. I shall now proceed to consider the population. According to the most ancient traditions, Thessaly was inhabited by all kinds of people of quite different names. The poets are fond of applying to the country, in the ancient mythical period, the name AEMONIA, which in those times is not an inappropriate name for Thessaly.[65] Among its earliest inhabitants, we have mention of the LAPITHAE, who dwelt on mount Pelion, I do not exactly know where, and are said to have expelled the CENTAURI. It is quite clear that the Greeks, in their mythology, conceived the Centaurs only as mythical beings; the explanation of a race of men living on horseback, is of late origin, and altogether uncertain; such a race, moreover, belongs to a plain and not to the mountains. The only river, besides the Peneus, which is of any historical importance, is the SPERCHIUS or SPERCHEUS in the south, which falls into the Euboean sea about four miles north of Thermopylae. Of poetical interest are the APIDANUS and the ANAURUS near Iolcus, on the banks of which Jason is said to have lost his shoe. In the west, in the territory of Pherae, we may notice lake Boebeis.