The direction of the Gulf-stream explains to us how the productions of tropical America are so frequently found on the shores of the Eastern Atlantic. Humboldt relates that the main-mast of the "Tilbury," a ship of the line, wrecked during the seven years' war on the coast of San Domingo, was carried by the Gulf-stream to the North of Scotland; and cites the still more remarkable fact, that casks of palm oil belonging to the cargo of an English vessel, which foundered on a rock near Cape Lopez, likewise found their way to Scotland, having thus twice traversed the wide Atlantic; first borne from east to west by the equatorial current, and then carried from west to east, between 45° and 55° N. latitude, by means of the Gulf-stream. Major Rennell ("Investigation of Currents") relates the peregrinations of a bottle, thrown overboard from the "Newcastle," on the 20th of January, 1819, in lat. 38° 52′, and long. 66° 20′, and ultimately found on the 2nd of June, 1820, on the shore of the Island of Arran. On the 16th of April, 1853, another bottle cast into the waters in the vicinity of the Bank of Newfoundland, on the 15th of March, 1852, was found near Bayonne, not far from the mouth of the Adour. On the coasts of Orcadia, a sort of fruit, commonly known by the name of _Molucca_, or Orkney beans, are found in large quantities, particularly after storms of westerly wind. These beans are the produce of West Indian trees (_Anacardium occidentale_), and find their way from the woods of Cuba and Jamaica, to the Ultima Thule of the ancients, by means of the Gulf-stream. Large quantities of American drift-wood are transported by the same current to the dreary shores of Iceland,--a welcome gift to the inhabitants of a region where the highest tree is but a dwarfish shrub, and cabbages of the size of an apple are raised, as a great rarity, in the governor's garden. A short time before Humboldt visited the island of Teneriffe, the sea had thrown out the trunk of a North American cedar-tree (_Cedrela odorata_), covered with the mosses and lichens that had grown upon it in the virgin forest.