abundantly, poisoning the atmosphere, that the natives who have lived in these abodes from their youth upward totter about as it were like spectres, while death almost inevitably snatches off the Europeans who enter there. As the hill between mountain and level land, so between the wood-formation and the plain a link is formed by the bush and the plains, displaying merely small, isolated groups of trees. A portion of the so-called woods on the northern coast of Australia must be reckoned here, those which clothe the enormous tract extending southward into the interior from Raffles Bay and Essington. They exhibit a wholly peculiar physiognomy, which is repeated almost everywhere throughout this strange country. The trees and bushes have leathery leaves, the majority of them being covered with a white, resinous powder, which gives them the most monotonous, dismal, pallid look possible. The principal trees are species of Eucalyptus, Acacia, Leptospermum and Melaleuca. Many other plants, scarcely to be reckoned by the side of those named, live beneath the shelter of those lofty grayish stems, which stand far apart, and by their meagre, incessantly trembling foliage, remind us of the weeping willow. Handsome tufts of grass, with long, slender halm, grow throughout the whole extent of these bushes, and in them nestle the kangaroo, with the ring-dove and other birds. The sun’s rays readily penetrate the narrow leaves, always waving on their long petioles, and produce an uncertain light mingled with fleeting shadows. The eye sees far up through the vault of twigs and leaves, and is arrested, not so much by the density of vegetation as by the continually changing glance of an uncertain mystic light. Still lighter, still less representative of the closed conditions of woods, is the proper palm-form where the social kinds are grouped together. The real palm-groves on the northern border of Sahara and on the shores of the Brazilian rivers more resemble open columned halls with perforated roofs; and on the dry soil of the elevated plains of Mexico the stems of the yucca, fourcroya, and other high-stemmed liliaceous plants are collected in a very peculiar way, affording neither shade from the sun nor shelter from the wind. To these approach the deformed masses of the Maguey-plants, with their broad, thick, rigid, dull-green leaves, sharply toothed on their borders, and their flowering stalks twenty feet high, rounded off into strange, fantastic, and impenetrable bush by cacti of manifold forms.