[Auffust, 1861.] 325 



BOTANY OF SPAIN. 



A Few Days' ■Botanizing in the North-Eastern Provinces of 

 Spain, in April and May, 1860. 



No, I. Catalonia. 



There is hardly any country in Europe whose floral treasures are 

 less known to botanists than those of Spain. That coijntry has pro- 

 duced few indigenous botanists. She possesses, practically speak- 

 ing, no local Flora ; the only one known to Europe being the 

 old, rare, and costly Avork of Cavanilles, in which, along with such 

 of the native plants as were known in his time, descriptions and 

 figures are given of the American and other exotics cultivated 

 in the Madrid Botanical Garden. There is another book, which 

 the present writer had never heard of, but which he saw on a 

 bookstall at Barcelona ; a ' Flora of Spain,' bearing a date soon 

 after the middle of the last century, in which the names given to 

 species are Linnsean, but the genera are arranged on the simple 

 and primitive plan of alphabetical order. M. Boissier, to whom 

 the botany of the Mediterranean basin is so much indebted, has 

 made excursions in several parts of Spain, the botanical results 

 of which have been published. And this is nearly all which has 

 been done for Spanish botany. Yet the country is one of the 

 most largely endowed in our quarter of the globe, with the con- 

 ditions on which variety of indigenous vegetation depends. It 

 reaches further south than any country in Europe ; the rock of 

 Gibraltar being some fifty miles nearer to the Equator than the 

 most southern promontories of Sicily or Greece. The low lati- 

 tude of the northern provinces, compared with England, Ger- 

 many, and the greater part of France, is more than compensated 

 by their mountainous character, which renders their vegetation a 

 copious sample of all northern climates, to the Arctic inclusive. 

 Modern investigation has shown that there is as marked a 

 difference between the western and eastern Floras, as between 

 the northern and southern ; and of this distribution also, both 

 branches are fully represented in the Peninsula. Its northern 

 and western coasts, especially if we include Portugal, are the 

 typical example of the western or Atlantic Flora ; while the dry 

 eastern districts, from the Pyrenees to Carthagena (and no doubt 



N. S. VOL. V. 2 G 



