The aspect of Zanzibar from the sea is that of coralline islands generally—a graceful, wavy outline of softly rounded ground, and a surface of ochre-coloured soil, thickly clothed with foliage alternating between the liveliest leek-green and the sombrest laurel, the only variety that vegetation knows in this land of eternal verdure. Everywhere the scenery is similar; each mile of it is a copy of its neighbour; and the want of variety, of irregularity, of excitement, so to speak, soon makes itself felt. Zanzibar ignores the exhilaration of pure desert air, and the exaltation produced by the stern aspect of mountain regions or by a boundless expanse of Pampa and Sahara. Without a single element of sublimity, soft and smiling, its sensuous and sequestered scenery has no power to spur the thought, to breed an idea within the brain. The oppressive luxuriance of its growth combined with the excess of damp heat, and possibly the abnormal proportion of ozone, are the most unfavourable conditions for the masculine. The same is the case in Mazanderan, Malabar, Egypt, Phœnicia, California, and other Phre-kah—lands of the sun. And the aspect of that everlasting, beginning-less, endless verdure tends, as on the sea-board of the Brazil, to produce sensations of melancholy and depression. We learn at last to loathe thee, ‘gay green, Thou smiling Nature’s universal robe!’ Landing upon the island, you find a thin strip of bright yellow sand separating the sea from a curtain of vegetation, which forms a continuous wall. In some parts madrepore rock, looped and caverned by the tide, and covered with weeds and testaceæ, whose congeners are fossilized in the stone, rises abruptly a few feet above the wave. At other places a dense growth of tangled mangrove jungle exposes during the ebb a sheet of black and sticky mire, into which man sinks knee- deep. The regularity of the outline is broken by low projecting spits and by lagoons and backwaters, which bite deep into the land. Their pestilential, fatal exhalations veil the low grounds with a perpetual haze, and the excess of carbon is favourable to vegetable as it is deleterious to animal life.