It was appropriated to a very remarkable and peculiar character of scenery:--A wild mountain-region, formed of white limestone, abounding in narrow glens, bounded by abrupt precipices, and permeated by whispering streams that frequently pour in slender cascades over the rocks. The limestone rock rises in abrupt terraces, wall above wall, and its entire surface is most singularly honeycombed, "as if wrought by a graving tool into rough diamond-points," alternating with smooth and rounded holes of various sizes, from that of a hazel-nut upward. In many of these hollows lie the small land-shells of the country, bleached perfectly white, like the stone itself, of the genera _Helix_, _Cyclostoma_, _Helicina_, _Cylindrella_, _Achatina_, &c., many of them perfect, but many more in fragments. They exactly resemble fossil shells _in situ_, but the species are absolutely identical with those that crawl over the shrubs and trees in the same region. In very many cases the dead shells accurately fit the hollows in the rock, whose interior is impressed with the form and sculpturing of the shell in _intaglio_:--a most curious and interesting fact, as it points to the very recent formation of the region, the stone bearing evident tokens of having been in a plastic condition when the shells were enveloped in it. Out of the hollows of the rock, their roots fast grasping the sharp-edged projections and tooth-like points of stone, and twining through the tortuous cavities, and insinuating their fibrils into every minute hollow where water may lodge, grow many tall trees of various kinds, interlaced with climbers, and hung with festoons of _lianes_, that resemble long and twisted cords, thrown from one to another, or depending from the branches towards the ground. The noble Agave, or what we in England call the American Aloe, here throws out its broad, fleshy, spine-edged leaves, and lifts its tall flower-stalk loaded with the candelabra-like branches of bloom; and numerous thick _Cacti_, some erect and massive, others whip-like, long and trailing, give a peculiar aspect to the vegetation. Great tufts of _Orchide{oe}_,--the lovely _Broughtonia_, with its thick ovate leaves, and racemes of elegant crimson flowers, the _Brasavola_, with long leaves resembling porcupine-quills in form, and blossoms of virgin white, the _Oncidium_, with its yellow and red flowers, like a score of painted butterflies dancing in every breath, and many others,--crowd the forks or droop from the twisted boughs of the trees.