Then came the discovery that for consumptives dry cold is a medium superior to damp heat. Invalids were sent to the Tyrol, to the Engadine, to Canada, and even to Iceland, where phthisis is absolutely unknown, and where a diet of oleaginous fish is like feeding upon cod-liver or shark-liver oil. The air as well as the diet proved a tonic, and patients escaped the frequent cough, catarrh, influenza, and neuralgia which are so troublesome at Funchal. Here, too, the invalid must be accompanied by a 'prudent and watchful friend,' or friends, and the companions will surely suffer. I know few climates so bad and none worse for those fecund causes of suffering in Europe, liver-affections ('mucous fevers'), diarrhoeas, and dysenteries; for nervous complaints, tic douloureux, and neuralgia, or for rheumatism and lumbago. Asthma is one of the disorders which shows the most peculiar forms, and must be treated in the most various ways: here some sufferers are benefitted, others are not. Madeira is reputedly dangerous also for typhoid affections, for paralysis, and for apoplexy. There is still another change to come. The valley north of the beautiful and ever maligned 'Dead Sea' of Palestine, where the old Knights Templar had their sugar-mills and indigo-manufactories, has peculiar merits. Lying some 1,350 feet below the Mediterranean, it enables a man to live with a quarter of a lung: you may run till your legs fail with fatigue, but you can no more get out of breath than you can sink in the saline waters of Lake Asphaltites. When a railway from Jafa to Jerusalem shall civilise the 'Holy Land,' I expect great things from the sites about the Jordan embouchure. After the 'gadding vine' had disappeared the people returned to their old amours, the sugar-cane, whose five loaves, disposed crosswise, gave the island her heraldic cognisance. Madeira first cultivated sugar in the western hemisphere and passed it on to the New World. Yet the cane was always worked under difficulties. Space is limited: the upper extreme of cultivation on the southern side may be estimated at 1,000 feet. The crop exhausts the soil; the plant requires water, and it demands what it can rarely obtain in quantity--manure. Again, machinery is expensive and adventure is small. Jamaica and her slave-labour soon reduced the mills from one hundred and fifty to three, and now five. My hospitable friend, Mr. William Hinton, is the only islander who works sugar successfully at the _Torreão_. The large rival mill with the tall regulation smoke-stack near the left mouth of the Ribeira de São' João, though inscribed 'Omnia vincit improbus labor,' and though provided with the most expensive modern appliances, is understood not to be a success for the Companhia Fabril d'Assucar.