4 
136 A Field Naturalists Holiday. [Sess. 
collection of montbretias, strawberries with long fruit, a 
great many cactus dahlias, and most striking lots of 
begonias; coxcombs of all colours, scarlet and orange, pink 
and greenish-yellow and cream colour. There were brilliant 
cannas in masses, and gladioli, and dahlias with little flowers 
not much bigger than a penny. Then there were waggon- 
loads of the finest apples and pears and oranges and plums 
from almost all parts of the world, and in the most beautiful 
condition. The horticultural shows which I saw were good, but 
they were not anything like one I saw in Paris some years 
ago in the Tuileries gardens. It was in May, and the ex- 
hibition was in great tents: rhododendrons and azaleas were 
placed in baskets and arranged in masses: the cut flowers 
were not put in bare tin stands, but surrounded with leaves 
and moss. The artistic effect was great: I have never seen 
a flower-show like it. That was a great summer flower-show, 
and as the Exhibition Shows went on all the summer, the same 
excellence could not be maintained. 
We leave the Palace of Horticulture and go towards the 
river. Outside the buildings we may notice many conifers 
and roses, and, had we been earlier in the year, rhododendrons. 
The number of different kinds of plants in the Exhibition 
grounds is immense. There were some hundreds of varieties 
of pears; there were 650 different kinds of trees and shrubs 
in the Champ de Mars alone. Along one bank, for a quarter 
of a mile or so, there were fruit-trees trained on espaliers 
of all forms. I have never seen trees trained with such 
recularity. 
We are now in the Pavilion of Forestry, Hunting, and 
Fishing. We see models of the manner in which hills are 
planted with trees, and, as they are cut, how they are re- 
planted. There are diagrams showing the importance of 
forests. It is very probable that the coasts of the Mediter- 
ranean—Greece, the Adriatic, South Italy, as far as Gibraltar 
—pbecame decadent more from the destruction of forests than 
from anything else. There were all kinds of nets and traps 
for catching fish; there were sponge culture, oyster culture, 
pearl culture, exhibits from marine stations. There were 
instruments used in hunting animals: here were skins by the 
thousand, many prepared for the market. I saw here some of 
