The great variety of soil and situation renders the Isle of Wight a place of interest to the botanist. We have the plants of chalk downs, of the sea cliff and shore, of the woods and meadows, of lane and hedgerow, and of the marshes. The old villages of the Island, often occupying very picturesque situations--as Godshill on a spur of the southern downs, Newchurch on a bluff overlooking the Yar valley, Shorwell nestling among trees in a south-looking hollow of the downs, Brighstone with its old church cottages and farmhouses among trees and meadows between down and sea--the old and interesting churches, the thatched cottages, the old manor houses of Elizabethan or Jacobean date, now mostly farm houses, for which the Island is famous, add to the varied natural beauty. One of the most characteristic features of the southern coasts of the Island, should be mentioned, the Chines,--narrow ravines which cut inland from the coast through the sandstone and clays of the Greensand and Wealden strata, and along the beds of which small streams flow to the sea. Narrow and steep-sided,--the name by which they are called is akin to _chink_--they are in striking contrast to the more open valleys of the streams which flow into the Solent on the north shore of the Island. The most beautiful is Shanklin Chine. The cliff at the mouth of the chine, just inside which stands a picturesque fisherman's cottage with thatched roof, is 100 ft. high; and the chasm runs inland for 350 yds., to where a very reduced cascade (for the water thrown out of the Upper Greensand by the Gault clay is tapped at its source for the town supply) falls vertically over a ledge produced by hard ferruginous beds of the Greensand. Above the cascade the ravine runs on, but much shallower, for some 900 yards. The lower ravine has much beauty, tall trees rising up the sides, and overshadowing the chasm, the banks thickly clothed with large ferns and other verdure. Much wilder are the chines on the south-west of the Island. The cascade at Blackgang falls over hard ferruginous beds (to which the beds over which Shanklin cascade falls--though on a smaller scale--probably correspond). The chine above these beds, being hollowed out in the soft clays and sands of the Sandrock series, is much more open. Whale Chine is a long winding ravine between steep walls, the stream at the bottom making its way through blocks of fallen strata.