The peninsula of Peloponnesus is properly a system of mountains of very different kinds; those by which it is connected with the main land of Greece, the Geranean and Oenean mountains, are of very different formation from the rest: they are more rugged and barren, and have little or no vegetation; those in the interior of the peninsula display the most luxuriant vegetation, and are far more fertile than the mountains of Italy. Few countries are equal to Peloponnesus in the abundance and beauty of its vegetation, which in spite of all devastations always revives with youthful vigour. Its mountains, although they contain districts without water, are on the whole abundantly supplied with it, especially in Arcadia, and it is this circumstance that makes the vegetation so splendid. I have been told by persons who had been in Arcadia, that no country on earth can compete with it in beauty on account of the forms of its mountains, its trees, etc., and the most magnificent Alpine vegetation is not richer than that of Arcadia. The highest points of the peninsula are the mountains which separate the maritime country of Achaia from Arcadia, in the neighbourhood of Stymphalus. In the ravines of those mountains snow is found even in summer, though not on the tops of the mountains, and there is not one mountain in all the peninsula, which is capped with snow. All Arcadia is a conglomeration of mountains, which, even with the assistance of maps can hardly be divided into their elements; whence it is a vain and useless attempt to fix the definite names which are mentioned by the ancients. We cannot, for example, define Mount Maenalus, and what is generally described as the site of Erymanthus, is only conjectural. All we can say, is that Maenalus was perhaps the central, and Lycaeus the southern range of Arcadian mountains. All these mountains and rivers now have different names: a proof that the Slavonians entirely changed the ancient population. The traveller asks in vain where the Alpheus is; Mount Taygetus is now called Pentadactylon, and all the other names are barbarous. Taygetus is very high, but not quite so high as the highest Arcadian mountains; the name belongs to the whole range from the frontiers of Arcadia down to Cape Taenarus, now Cape Matapan.