This is a landscape requiring a new name. I now could understand that strange term, “Rolling Prairies:”--it must be a similar formation, swelling, but not hill-like; tame, but not valley-like; expanse not like that of the sea; undulations not like those of the land; and over the whole a preadamite vastness, unbroken till you come abruptly to the edge of the gulfs. Were the elevation thousands instead of hundreds of feet, and the distance from the sea thousands instead of tens of miles, then it would require but snake-grass and buffaloes to witness an estampado without crossing the Atlantic. It was quite delightful to get upon the hills again: they were rugged aluminous schist, well clothed with trees of extreme beauty, but moderate size, principally the cork oak. I here first saw the Arar, the Thuya articulata, a tree between a cypress in the leaf, and a pine in the figure. The wood is invaluable; no worm touches it, and it endures for ever; it does not split; and though hard is easily wrought. They use it for the beams of the houses which are near the ceilings of apartments: those ceilings of “cedar and vermilion,” that we read of in the Prophets and the “Arabian Nights.” It has the odour of the cedar, and yields pitch and turpentine. There is also an evergreen like the thorn, bearing a berry like the haw: they call it _Berri_, and make oil from it. This is the Eliodendron of the Greeks. Further to the south there is the _Argan_, from the nut of which a much esteemed oil is made. The oak furnishes the Bellotis, which, without ceasing to be an Arcadian, is here a real food. Habits still draw very closely on the Arcadian. Water is their drink; their food milk and wheat not fermented, and subjected to scarcely any cooking. To their grain and milk they add dried fruits, fresh acorns, palmetto root, truffles, the lotus berry, and the like. The country produces the plants which yield sago and arrow-root. Hunting was not the primitive state of man, nor flesh his original diet. If all the literature of the world were destroyed except that of the Hudson’s Bay Company, such a belief might be pardonable in future times. We put ourselves in a similar predicament when we take the pictures of early Greece as the first steps of the human race. The names of the first slayers of animals and eaters of flesh have been recorded, and yet we treat as a fable all that is enumerated of these times, because they talk of living upon acorns. A garden was the residence of our first parents. I had made one step backward towards the reality of early fable, when I wandered in the indubitable Hesperides and plucked their golden fruit; but now, amongst the cork forests, and seeing acorns and glands plucked and fed upon, I made a second, and reached the golden age itself.