cereal crops penetrate to it. It is only the mixture of pride and laziness and ignorance of the Castilian peasant, his senseless disdain of all improvement, his want of ambition for anything better, that prevents progress in this part of Spain. He refused to make use of the machinery invented for him in the last century, nor will he avail himself of the means of irrigation and the still better machines provided for him now. Yet there is no agricultural country in which machinery could be introduced to greater advantage. Perhaps no better idea can be given of the productions of Spain, and of the diversity of its climates and fruits, than by comparing those of Murcia with those of the north-west and the centre. In January the bean is in flower in Murcia, in April in Madrid; the vine and the wheat flower in April in Murcia, but not till May or June in the province of Madrid. The climate of Galicia, with its almost continual rain, and Murcia with its droughts, are perhaps the most opposite climates of Spain. The one is a land of pasture and of flax cultivation; its fruits are the apple, the pear, the peach, strawberries, currants, and nuts of all kinds; the predominant plant on the hill-sides is the furze, in Murcia it is the Esparto grass. The fruits there cultivated in the gardens are exotic, and have almost wholly replaced the indigenous flora; the "huertas," the gardens or cultivated plains, are there almost like oases in a desert. The fauna of Spain--except in one particular, the monkeys (_Macacus Innuus_) which inhabit the rock of Gibraltar, and which are the only animals of their kind wild in Europe--does not greatly differ from that of the rest of Southern Europe. In the highest part of the Pyrenees, in the Sierra de Credos, and in the Sierra Nevada, the izard or chamois still exists in considerable numbers. Whether the bouquetin is really extinct, or still survives in the Spanish Pyrenees, is a disputed point. In the forests which clothe the lower spurs, roe and fallow deer, wild goats and wild boars, and in some districts red deer, are still to be found. The beasts of prey are the bear, the wolf, the lynx, the fox, wild cat, marten, ferret, weasel, &c.; and these are assisted by the no less rapacious birds of prey--the vultures, eagles, hawks, falcons, kites, harriers, pies, and jays. The game birds and animals are the pheasant, now very rare, partridges of both kinds, bustards, both large and small, sand-grouse, quails, which come in immense quantities to the vineyards and maize-fields in the summer and autumn, woodcock, snipe; wild duck, geese, all kinds of water-birds and waders, visit the marshes of the rivers and the lagoons of the coast in winter; and on the southern shores meet the flamingoes, pelicans, spoonbills, and other birds from the African coast. From the same quarter come numerous and brighter-plumaged birds of passage; orioles, bee-eaters, hoopoes, and