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Marsan, a distance of sixty-two miles, in eight hours and a half, 

 including an hour's stop at Dax, where we breakfasted. Cork-trees 

 are abundant on the road ; and Erica scoparia is everywhere, forming 

 tall, upright bushes, sometimes almost as large as those of E. arborea. 

 Mont de Marsan is hardly on a hill, in spite of its name. It stands 

 on a slightly elevated point between two little streams. The immedi- 

 ate neighbourhood is cultivated ; but the pine-woods of the Landes 

 surround it at a little distance. 1 was not well enough to explore 

 their recesses. The inn there (Hotel des Ambassadeurs) is exceed- 

 ingly comfortable. At noon on the 13th I found room in the mail for 

 Bordeaux, to which place we proceeded at the rate of ten miles an 

 hour ; but I was again unwell, and hardly equal to calling on my 

 old acquaintance, M. Laterrade, at the Botanic Garden. He assured 

 me I should find Salicornias at La Teste ; and on the 16th I went 

 there. It is well that any English botanist who finds himself at Bor- 

 deaux should know that La Teste is a small village, entirely without 

 interest, and that the place to be visited is at the baths, two miles fur- 

 ther on ; but he will find omnibuses to take him there from the station 

 at La Teste. Murray, in his Hand-book, ridicules the projectors of 

 the railway from Bordeaux to La Teste for not knowing that railroads 

 do not form villages. I think in this case he is doubly wrong, for I 

 believe the chief object of the railway was to enable the produce of 

 the country to find a market in Bordeaux, which the deep sand of 

 the natural roads rendered impossible ; and I think we may see in the 

 increased extent of cultivation and plantation that they have not been 

 disappointed. If the bathing-place had been the main dependance of 

 these projectors, they would not have stopped two miles short of it. 

 In the second place, in spite of this drawback, the railway has made 

 of the bathing-place a very long village, not on the open sea, but on 

 the shores of the spacious salt-water lake of Arcachon. The scat- 

 tered and often fanciful cottages, standing mostly detached, and not 

 forming rows of lodgings, mixed with the pine-woods, and exhibited 

 on the varied line of the shore, have often a very pleasing and pictu- 

 resque effect. There is at the baths abundance of an Atriplex, 

 which is certainly the A. rosea of Laterrade, and probably that of 

 Duby ; but it is not the plant I have collected under that name in 

 Germany and the South-east of France, and which I believe to be the 

 plant of Koch. It is, I think, ray A. arenaria, but of much stronger 

 growth, owing perhaps to a warmer climate. It has a firm, erect 

 central stem, and numerous branches from its base, decumbent at 

 first, but ascending in the flowering part, and as long or longer, if 



