pestilence in Rome the snake brought over from the temple of Esculapius at Epidauris is said to have glided out of the ship, on arriving at Antium, and to have wound itself round the palm-tree in the sacred grove of Apollo; after having remained there three days it quietly returned to the ship, which continued its voyage to Rome. The oleander, the rhododendron, rhododaphne, or nerium of the Greeks and Romans-so frequently seen on the Pompeian walls,--is not mentioned in Greek literature, and not in Roman literature till Virgil. Hehn believes that it came from Asia Minor into Greece after Theophrastus's time, and did not pass into Italy till much later. It was first cultivated in gardens, but it soon began to grow wild by the sides of streams, where it had free play, as sheep and goats would not touch it on account of its being poisonous to them-a fact already mentioned by Pliny. It is now so common that it has been thought to be indigenous in Italy.

The peach, the apricot, and the melon did not come into Italy till the first century of the Christian era. The peach (the malum persicum, or Persian apple of the Romans) is, according to A. de Candolle, a native of China as well as the apricot, which Pliny calls præcocia, and which was believed to have come from Armenia. The same botanist shows that the pomegranate (the malum punicum or granatum of the Romans) is a native of Persia and of a few adjacent countries, and not of North Africa; and that the cherry, brought to Italy by Lucullus from Pontus in 64 B. C., was probably an improved variety of a tree which existed in Italy long before.

A cut melon found among the fruit painted on the Pompeian walls, and also a representation of a melon in an ancient mosaic in the Vatican, have proved conclusively that the melon of the Romans was the same as ours-a fact for a long time disputed. De Candolle remarks that its quality was probably inferior, as the ancient writers give it but faint praise. Dr. Comes assumes that the cucumis which was cultivated under glass for the Emperor Tiberius, was the melon, but this is very doubtful, and it was more probably the cucumber. The native regions of the melon were India and Western Africa.

Dr. Comes gives an interesting account of the plants represented on the Pompeian

frescoes and in the mosaics, or found, like the bean and the walnut, solely in the excavations. He has recognized about fifty kinds. Schouw, who had gone over the same ground previously, mentions a few which Comes has not been able to identify, but Comes has found a larger number. The fruit and flowers in the representations of still life are executed with great fidelity; where they are introduced as ornaments or accessories they are not so easily recognized, as the decorators of the latter period gave free scope to their fancy, and made Nature entirely subservient to art. In the celebrated Flower Gatherer, for instance, found at Gragnano, and now in the Naples Museum, the plant from which she gathers the flowers has been drawn not from Nature, but from the imagination of the artist.

The vegetation in Italy was much more limited then than at present. In the days of Virgil and Pliny, even as now, the vine "married to the elm," or in Campania to the poplar, hung in festoons from tree to tree, and the pale green of the olive blended with the soft blue sky, but the orange and lemon-trees, now so inseparably associated with Italy, were absent. They were unknown to the Greeks and Romans. The lemon, which came originally from India through Persia and Arabia, was not cultivated in Europe till about the middle of the thirteenth century. The bitter orange, also a native of India, had come into Europe a century and a half earlier, when it was first cultivated ind Sicily. Both were most likely introduced by the Arabs. The sweet orange was, according to some authorities, brought from China by the Portuguese in 1548. De Candolle, however, believes this was only an improved species, and that the fruit had already come into cultivation in Europe in the fourteenth century. The citron tree, a native of India, first seen by the Greeks in Persia and Media during Alexander's campaigns, and described by Theophrastus, probably became acclimatized in Italy in the third century of the Christian era. Virgil, in the Georgics, describes it as a foreign fruit-tree, and Pliny speaks of vain attempts that had been made to transplant it, saying that in his time it only grew in Media and Persia. It is, therefore, an anachronism to suppose that any of these fruits could have represented to the ancients the golden apples

from the garden of the Hesperides, with which the citron was afterward sometimes identified. Pliny speaks of a kind of quince called the chrysomela (golden apple), and it is probable that the apples of the Hesperides and of Atalanta were nothing but idealized quinces, the only golden apples known to the ancients. Dr. Comes shows that this is corroborated by the fact that the Hercules Farnese holds three quinces in his hand. The quince, like the apple and the pomegranate, was dedicated to Aphrodite. They all came under the denomination of apples, and the quince was called the cydonian apple because the best came from Cydonia, in Crete. It had, according to Solon's Laws, to be tasted by the bride before marriage. In poetry, it is frequently used as a metaphor, as in some pretty lines of Leonidas of Tarentum in the Greek Anthology. On the Pompeian frescoes there are two rep. resentations of a bear eating a quince, and the quince also appears in the mosaic of the house of the Faun.

Among the fruit which are generally represented in the triclinia, we find the peach, the melon, the gourd, the pumpkin, the fig, the almond, the pomegranate, the grape, the cherry, the date, the pear, and the apple. The peach, which had not been long introduced into Italy in Pliny's time, and was still a rare and expensive luxury, only appears once, in the house of Sirieus. The salve lucru (m) in mosaic letters on the threshold of this house, has led to the supposition that the owner was a merchant, and the decorations and objects found in it showed that he was a wealthy man who liked surrounding himself with the luxuries of life. The asparagus was found represented on the wall of the triclinium of the Casa del Gallo. This was an indigenous plant, already cultivated with great care in Cato's time. Pliny praises the kind that grew wild in the island of Nesis off the Campanian coast.

The flora of the Greeks and Romans was much less varied than ours, but they cultivated flowers in great profusion, and they used them largely for making garlands. These were woven either of leaves or flowers, and the flowers were chiefly roses and violets. They were used for religious and funeral purposes, for rewarding the brave, crowning the victors in games, as love offerings, and they were

worn in the temples and at the banquets. The Romans distinguished between the corona and the serta, the latter representing chiefly the garlands or festoons for decorating altars, doors, and drinking vessels. A good example of the serta may be seen sculptured on a Pompeian tomb known as the tomb of the Garlands.

The tradition about the origin of the banqueter's wreath was that it had originally been worn as a tight band round the head to avert the effects of wine-drinking, and that the first wreath had been made of ivy and worn by Bacchus himself, for which reason the ivy was dedicated to Bacchus. Alexander the Great returned from India crowned with ivy in imitation of Bacchus, the conqueror of India. According to another tradition, wreaths were worn in remembrance of the chains of Prometheus. Strict laws among the Romans forbade their being worn indiscriminately on all occasions. Pliny tells the story of a banker, L. Fulvius, who was imprisoned by order of the Senate for having at the time of the Second Punic War looked down from the balcony of his house into the forum with a chaplet of roses on his head. It was customary to approach the gods with a crown on the head because, according to Aristotle, no mutilated gift could be offered to the gods but only such as were perfect and complete, and crowning anything indicates completing it. At the banquets wreaths were provided by the host, who thus did honor to his guests. As a crown on the head expressed the fulness of life and joy, it was out of place in the house of mourning.

The Greeks and Romans carried a great refinement into the art of garland-making. They studied the language of flowers and how to blend the perfumes as well as the colors. This art had been developed by the Greek flower-girl Glycera and the painter Pausias in their ingenious contest to outvie each other in the most subtle expression of the beautiful, she, in plaiting the wreaths, he in reproducing them in painting, "a contest," says Pliny, "in reality between Art and Nature." Sometimes wreaths were worn round the neck that the wearer might enjoy the perfume more, and roses were scattered over the table for the same purpose. An illustration of this may be seen in one of the lately excavated houses at Pompeii, the

Casa del Simposio, where there are three representations of a symposium; the floor and table are strewn with rose-leaves, and one of the guests wears a red garland round his neck. The utmost refinement of luxury consisted in sewing together the petals of the roses alone--the corona sutilis. A perfect wreath of this kind was found last year by Mr. Flinders Petrie in the ancient cemetery of Hawara in Egypt. The lemnisci, or ribbons made of the delicate membranes of the lime-bark, were attached to the wreaths.

The rose was in antiquity, as it is now, the queen of the garden, and Campania was the land of roses. It was represented on the coins of Rhodos, Pæstum, Neapolis, Cyrene, and other places famous for the flower. The cultivated rose was one of the few double flowers known to the ancients. It had come to the Greeks from Media, and can be traced through Phrygia, Thrace, and Macedonia. Athenæus quotes from the poet Nicander :

The poets tell That Midas first, when Asia's realms he left, Brought roses from th' Odonian hills of Thrace,

And cultivated them in th' Emathian lands,

Blooming and fragrant with their sixty petals. Einathia was part of Macedonia, and the rose garden of Midas was, according to Herodotus, at the foot of Mount Bermion in Macedonia.

Every flower and tree in antiquity had its myth, and was dedicated to some divinity. The rose had, according to one legend, sprung from the blood of the dying Adonis; according to another the white rose had been colored red by the blood of the goddess Aphrodite herself when she ran through the thorns to succor her favorite. The symbol of all that is most beautiful, most enjoyable, and most perishable, it was dedicated to Aphrodite, and it was also the flower of Dionysus in his double character of the god of blooming nature and the god of the under-world, the mystic form in which his worship had come with the Greek colonies from the Peloponnesus into Southern Italy. It was the flower of the feast and the flower of the tombs. The best authorities consider it almost impossible now to identify the roses of the ancients. Theophrastus mentions that in his time, the inhabitants of Philippi in Macedonia were cultivating the rosa centifolia, which they had trans

planted there from Mount Pangæus, where it grew in great abundance. Pliny says that the rose which flourished best in Campania was also the centifolia, but his descriptions of the roses, though no doubt intelligible to his contemporaries, are very perplexing to modern botanists, and some of them have even doubted whether the ancients knew the centifolia of the present day. Schleiden believes the rose of Midas was the rosa gallica, the earliest rose cultivated in Greece, and now growing wild there. Comes identifies the rosebuds on the Pompeian walls with the damask rose, which Sprengel believed to have been the celebrated rose of Fæstum that blossomed twice in the year. Other authorities think that the damask rose did not come into Europe till the time of the Crusades, or even later. The demand for roses was so great in the days of Martial, that in winter the Romans cultivated them under glass or imported them from Egypt, which, on account of its beautiful climate, had proved a fruitful soil for the acclimatization of plants when the Ptolemies had carried Greek culture thither.

the

The Florentine and the German iris, daffodil, the hollyhock, the red cornthe yellow water-iris, the narcissus, the poppy, the reed, the corn-flag, the aster amellus or Italian starwort, that grew by the winding streams of Mella,' corn-cockle, the ox-eye, the aloe, the soft acanthus, the laurel of Alexandria, the Indian millet, the wheat, are all represented either on the Pompeian walls or in the mosaics. The tamarind, the papyrus, and the lotus flower appear only in the Egyptian scenery. Among the trees on the walls are the oak, the chestnut, the stone pine, the cypress, the laurel, the myrtle, the olive, the ivy, the vine, the palm, the plane, the gum arabic, the black mulberry, and the cherry trec. The importance the Romans attached to their gardens implies that the gardener was a person of some consequence, and we learn from Cicero that the topiarii ranked among the superior slaves. Hehn and Friedländer give good reasons for believing that the Roman gardeners were chiefly Orientals. At the very time when Roman power and luxury were in the ascendant, Italy was overrun with Semitic slaves, who were better suited than those of any other race for the servile condition. Their gentleness, and patience, their peaceful, laborious tastes,

while rendering them unfit to be soldiers and gladiators, eminently qualified them for domestic service, and especially for the care required in tending plants. Moreover, gardening in the East was held in great esteem, whence the Greek proverb, "There are many vegetables in Syria." Born and bred among such traditions they had brought with them a natural taste, a superior knowledge and aptitude highly useful to the Romans in their attempts at acclimatization. They had been trained in the arts of grafting, of creating new species by judicious selection, of turning every sport of Nature to account, and even of dwarfing the trees an art which is now carried to such a high degree of perfection in Japan. Virgil's old man of Tarentum, who had made the wilderness blossom like the rose, was himself from Corycus in Cilicia, the country adjoining Syria.

Amid the passing fashions of a luxurious age Virgil's picture of the old Corycian's garden stands out in immortal beauty and simplicity: "I remember that under the lofty turrets of Ebalia, where black Galæsus moistened the yellow fields,

I saw an old Corycian to whom belonged a few acres of neglected land not rich enough for the plough, nor fit for grazing, nor kindly for vines. Yet here planting among the bushes a few pot-herbs, white lilies, vervain and slender poppies, he matched in his content the wealth of kings; and returning late at night was used to load his board with unbought dainties. He was the first to gather the rose in spring and fruit in autumn; and even while stern winter was still splitting the rocks with cold and bridling the rivers with ice, in that very season he would pluck the tender hyacinth, chiding the late spring and the lazy zephyrs. His teeming bees were the first to swarm, he was the first to strain the frothing honey from the pressed combs: abundant limes and pines were his, and for every blossom the fertile tree had borne in early spring, it bore fruit in autumn ripeness. He also was the last to plant out his elms and peartrees when they had hardened, and the sloes already bearing plums, and the planes grown broad enough to shade the feast." -Macmillan's Magazine.

I HAVE no desire to intrude myself before the Public, and as regards the subject of Handbooks for Travellers I have never put forward any statement of my claims as author and originator of them. Having been requested, however, to give some account of the origin of Murray's Handbooks, I have consented to do so the more readily after reading an article recently contributed to the Pall Mall Gazette on the subject of Baedeker's Guides. The writer of that article would appear to claim for Mr. Baedeker the credit of inventing this class of work, and he entirely ignores the existence of Murray and his Handbooks for Travellers, omitting all allusion to them. Now there are already in existence twenty-nine of my Handbooks--including the Handbooks to the Cathedrals-dealing with the British Islands alone; and if the compiler of a new Guide to Great Britain has in no case made use of this mass of material, he has exhibited a remarkable example of forbearance and abstinence.

No doubt the Editor of such a book would be called upon to travel over a considerable part of the country himself, and in dealing with a vast number of facts, and of matters liable to constant change, he could not fail to find much to correct and supplement in the work of his predecessors; but the claim of originating this species of Literature, and of having brought it to "the level of a fine art, " which the writer in the Pall Mall broadly asserts on behalf of Messrs. Baedeker, would, I feel sure, be repudiated by them, since at the outset of their series they acknowledged once and again the obligations they were under to Murray; not only confessing that they made bis Guides the basis and framework upon which their own were founded, but that in some instances they directly translated from his work.

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In consequence of this challenge, however, I feel bound not to allow myself to be deprived of what credit attaches to me as the author, inventor, and originator of a class of works which, by the invariable testimony of Travellers, during more than half a century, have been of the greatest utility and comfort to them-which, in

fact, may be said to have had no little influence in producing the result of Travelling made easy.

Since so many thousands of persons have profited by these books, it may be of some interest to the public to learn their origin, and the cause which led me to prepare them. to prepare them. Having from my early youth been possessed by an ardent desire to travel, my very indulgent Father acceded to my request, on condition that I should prepare myself by mastering the language of the country I was to travel in. Accordingly in 1829, having brushed up my German, I first set foot on the Continent at Rotterdam, and my "Handbook for Holland" gives the results of my personal observations and private studies of that wonderful country.

At that time such a thing as a Guidebook for Germany, France, or Spain did not exist. The only Guides deserving the name were: Ebel, for Switzerland; Boyce, for Belgium; and Mrs. Starke for Italy. Hers was a work of real utility, because, amid a singular medley of classical lore, borrowed from Lemprière's Dictionary, interwoven with details regulating the charges in washing-bills at Sorrento and Naples, and an elaborate theory on the origin of Devonshire Cream, in which she proves that it was brought by Phoenician colonists from Asia Minor into the West of England, it contained much practical information gathered on the spot. But I set forth for the North of Europe unprovided with any guide, excepting a few manuscript notes about towns and inns, &c., in Holland, furnished me by my good friend Dr. Somerville, husband of the learned Mrs. Somerville. These were of the greatest use. Sorry was I when, on landing at Hamburg, I found myself destitute of such friendly aid. It was this that impressed on my mind the value of practical information gathered on the spot, and I set to work to collect for myself all the facts, information, statistics, &c., which an English tourist would be likely to require or find useful. I travelled thus, note-book in hand, and whether in the street, the Eilwagen, or the Picture Gallery, I noted down every fact as it oc