AND DISTRIBUTE INSECT VARIETY. 15 



rife, which imagined an age when Sicily was one with Italy, 

 and no sea as yet roared between Scylla and Charybdis. And 

 some score of years back. Dr. Faulkener made the discovery of 

 the skeletons of elephants, a g-igantic tortoise, and immense 

 mouse in Malta, an island only seventeen miles long- and 

 seven broad, not so large as our own Isle of Wight ; while 

 in Sicily, bones of the hippopotamus have been exhumed 

 similar to those of the denizens of the Upper Nile. So that 

 these lands, the argument goes, must have been originally 

 connected. 



Italy, then, I concluded, was the country where the Muse 

 president over the present work especially dwelt recluse, and to 

 Italy I must wend ; so packing up my MS., and entering the 

 train at Calais, while the skirts of winter yet lay on the land- 

 scape, a ride over the beds of the old cretaceous ocean brought 

 me to Paris ere the now famous electric lights were kindled 

 before the Opera House. Here I waited some days to meet a 

 compagne de voyage, and then away down the endless river- 

 valleys of the Allier and Rhone, gazing wearily at the poplars 

 hung with mistletoe-balls, and endeavouring to form some idea 

 of local temperatures from the soft foliage kindling on their 

 boughs, till Orange, that gave a scion to the British Throne, at 

 length reared high her Roman arch, and bade enter the garden 

 of the South. Avignon, whilom abode of the Popes and 

 Petrarca, shows a matter-of-fact little station with gigs in 

 waiting, and the sound of the Durance is heard pouring its 

 chaplet of roses on the ripples. And then the sea ! the sea ! 

 Marseilles — with her fountains and avenues of grey Oriental 

 plane, where voices blend with the music of the boughs, birds, 

 and bells, and every window is barred against riot and revelry — 

 has passed like a dream. The little hot gullies of Nice and 

 Cannes, with the French ironclads practising in the offing; 

 Genoa and its ships, much as Columbus left it ; Pisa, with the 

 celebrated tower that hangs, as indeed, as far as statics are con- 

 cerned, do some of the campaniles at Venice ; Florence, with 

 its pictures and low-trellised vineyards ; Milton^s Vallombrosa 

 — a round, bare hill apparently ; — Rome, with omnibuses, and 

 the Tiber swerving a yellow flood resembling a gravelly gutter 

 after a thunder-shower, — all are passed, and at length we reach 



