I respect the elder Pliny as a man--his nephew has told us how his steady snoring could be heard amidst the thunders of Vesuvius, when everybody else was scared, _Epistolæ_, VI. 16. 13--but as an author he was not at his best. His nephew has described his ways: how he gave every moment of spare time to reading books or having books read to him, always making notes and extracts as he went along, _Epistolæ_, III. 5. But he did not always take things down correctly. Theophrastos says that the plane tree was rare (spanian) in Italy, _Historia plantarum_, IV. 5. 6, and Pliny has turned this into plane trees in Italy and Spain, _Historia naturalis_, XII. 3 (7). More than half of what he says of trees is copied out of Theophrastos, but he has interspersed it with his snippets out of other authors who were not always speaking of the same varieties. And thus he has created things that never have existed and could not possibly exist. At the end of an impossible tale, _Gargantua_, I. 6, Rabelais very justly says that after all he wasn’t as big a liar as Pliny, “et toutesfoys ie ne suis poinct menteur tant asseuré comme il a esté.” The trees which shed their leaves are gorgeous with their autumn tints, and many kinds of them are graceful in the winter with bare boughs, especially just after snow. Writing at the window where I am writing now, my grandfather notes down, 3 January 1847, “Each flake takes up its position and there remains. I hope no wind will disturb it before I can go out and take a view of the country around: which I hope to do, even if it’s up to knees.” I feel that too; but bare boughs always remind me it is winter-time, and I might easily forget that dismal fact down here, if all the trees were green. If I were making a fresh start, I would surround myself with cedar and cypress, pine and fir, holly trees and bay trees, palm trees, yucca and New Zealand flax, Portugal laurel, arbutus, camellia, rhododendron, and other such trees and shrubs. The earliest kind of rhododendron (the Nobleanum) starts flowering here at Christmas. One of mine has nearly a hundred great red trusses of bloom now--January--and the red camellias are coming out. Sometimes on winter days the thermometer goes up to 90° in the sun; and there is seldom any great extremity of cold. My grandfather notes, 11 February 1855, “Thermometer at front door now 20°, such as I never remember seeing before.” He noted thermometer, barometer, wind and weather, every day in books he kept for that, and every week he sent a copy to my father to compare with his own notes. But my father’s notes were very irregular, as he was often away, whereas my grandfather seldom stirred, at any rate in his later years (1840 to 1870) for which I have his notes. Also, my father met with difficulties that were unknown down here. Instead of the temperature on 11 September 1850 there is a note of “My thermometer stolen from the garden wall last night,” and no more temperatures for several days.