This is, however, not to be understood as meaning that any tree produces in the same part, fruit or flowers more than once a-year; but the time of each part’s bearing is very particularly distributed. The west side of every tree is the first that blossoms, there its fruit proceeds in all stages of ripeness till it falls to the ground. It is succeeded by the south, which undergoes the same process. From this it crosses the tree, and the north is next in fruit; last of all comes the east, which produces flowers and fruit till the beginning of the rainy season. In the end of April new leaves push off the old ones without leaving the tree at any time bare, so that every tree in Abyssinia appears to be an evergreen. The last I saw in flower was the coffee-tree at Emfras the 20th of April 1770: from this time till the rains begin, and all the season of them, the trees get fully into leaf, and the harvest, which is generally in these months throughout Abyssinia, supplies the deficiency of the seed upon bushes and trees. All the leaves of the trees in Abyssinia are very highly varnished, and of a tough leather like texture, which enables them to support the constant and violent rains under which they are produced. This provision made for granivorous birds, in itself so ample, is doubled by another extraordinary regulation. The country being divided by a ridge of mountains, a line drawn along the top of these divides the seasons likewise; so that those birds to whom any one food is necessary become birds of passage, and, by a short migration, find the same seasons, and the same food, on the one side, which the rains and change of weather had deprived them of on the other. There is no great plenty of water-fowl in Abyssinia, especially of the web-footed kind. I never remember to have seen one of these that are not common in most parts of Europe. Vast variety of storks cover the plains in May, when the rains become constant. The large indigenous birds that reside constantly on the high mountains of Samen and Taranta, have most of them an extraordinary provision made against the wet and the weather; each feather is a tube, from the pores of which issue a very fine dust or powder, in such abundance as to stain the hand upon grasping them. This I shall presently mention in the description of one of these birds, the golden eagle of Lamalmon. In looking at this dust through a very strong magnifying power, I thought I discerned it to be in form of a number of fine feathers.