It was an instructive lesson that Francesco Marmocchi, _quondam_ professor of natural history, _quondam_ minister of Tuscany, now Fuoruscito, and poor solitary student, gave me, that rosiest of all morning hours as we stood high up on the green Mount Cardo, the fair Mediterranean extended at our feet, exactly of such a colour as Dante has described: _color del Oriental zaffiro_. "See," said Marmocchi, "where the blue outline shows itself, yonder is the beautiful Toscana." Ah, I see Toscana well; plainly I see fair Florence, and the halls where the statues of the great Tuscans stand, Giotto, Orcagna, Nicola Pisano, Dante, Petrarca, Boccacio, Macchiavelli, Galilei, and the godlike Michael Angelo; three thousand Croats--I can see them--are parading there among the statues; the air is so clear, you can see and hear everything: listen, Francesco, to the verses the marble Michael Angelo is now addressing to Dante:-- "Dear is to me my sleep, and that I am of stone; While this wo lasts, this ignominy deep, To see nought, and to hear nought, that alone Is well; then wake me not, speak low, and weep!" But do you see how this dry brown rock has decorated himself over and over with flowers? On his head he wears a glorious plume of myrtles, white with blossom, and his breast is wound with a threefold cord of honour; with ivy, bramble, and the white wild vine--the clematis. There are no fairer garlands than those wreaths of clematis with their clusters of white blossom, and delicate leaves; the ancients loved them well, and willingly in lyric hours wore them round their heads. Within the compass of a few paces, what a profusion of different plants! Here are rosemary and cytisus, there wild asparagus, beside it a tall bush of lilac-blossomed erica; here again the poisonous euphorbia, which sheds a milk-white juice when you break it; and here the sympathetic helianthemum, with its beautiful golden flowers, which one by one all fall off when you have broken a single twig; yonder, outlandish and bizarre, stands the prickly cactus, like a Moorish heathen, near it the wild olive shrub, the cork-oak, the lentiscus, the wild fig, and at their roots bloom the well-known children of our northern homes--the scabiosa, the geranium, and the mallow. How exquisite, pungent, invigorating are the perfumes that all this blooming vegetation breathes forth; the rue there, the lavender, the mint, and all those labiatae. Did not Napoleon say on St. Helena, as his mournful thoughts turned again to his native island: "All was better there, to the very smell of the soil; with shut eyes I should know Corsica from its fragrance alone." Let us hear something from Marmocchi now, on the botany of Corsica in general.