Majorca, with its satellites Minorca and Iviça, forms a very fine possession. The largest of the islands, with its fifty miles of extent and area covering 1,300 square miles, is nearly square, with its two large bays of Palma and Alcudia on either side and a projection to the south-west; but the grace and beauty of its outline should have saved it from being called a ‘quadrilateral trapezoid.’ A fine range of mountains, mainly of Jurassic limestone (lias), occupies the western and northern sides of the island, with peaks rising to near 5,000 feet. The ‘Puig Galatzo,’ in sight from Palma, is 3,500, and the ‘Puig Major,’ farther north, 4,700 feet in height. The mountainous part contains lovely valleys, with much terrace-cultivation of oranges and olives, many flowering shrubs, and with the higher slopes clothed in forests of Aleppo pines. From this deep green vegetation perpendicular cliffs and peaks of white marble stand out against the deep blue sky. There are lower hills near the south coast, but the rest of the island is a most fertile _huerta_ or garden, covered with almond and apricot trees, and crops or pasture beneath them. In the early spring the whole is one vast sea of almond-blossom. Ancient olive and carob trees take the place of almonds near the skirts of the mountains. On the northern side of the mountains, especially at Miramar, with the sea far below and the white peaks shooting up into the sky, the scene is a perfect dream of loveliness. The Arab conquerors fully appreciated the beauty and advantages of Majorca, with its inheritance of Carthaginian and Roman traditions, ruins, and aqueducts. For does not the chronicler Ask-shakandi describe the island as ‘one of the most fertile and best cultivated countries that God ever made, and the most abundant in provisions of all kinds’? while the poet Ibn-al-labneh tells us that to its capital ‘the ringdove lent the prismatic colours of his collar, and the peacock his beautiful variegated plumage’!