86 ISLES OF SUMMER. 



fortunately relieved, liowerer, from all obligation to '* dress and 

 keep it." If we had the learning of an old and experienced 

 botanist, we should have seen too much. As it was, we saw as 

 much as, untrained and unpracticed, we could well master, or 

 describe in a single chapter. A few pen-photograjjhs of some of 

 the more striking floral scenes and pictures which we witnessed, 

 may communicate to our readers something of the interest and 

 pleasure which the reality produced upon the mind of the author. 



The first impression was one of astonishment at finding upon 

 such almost naked rocks anything above lichens and the smaller 

 and simpler forms of vegetable life. But nature is never as un- 

 just or partial as she often appears to the casual observer. When 

 she withholds with one hand, she, with the other, is busy 

 dispensing lavishly her gifts. The princijile of compensation 

 exists everywhere throughout her Avide domain. Human life 

 and human experience teem with evidences of this great and 

 universal truth, Avhile the material world, in all its varied and 

 wondrous forms, is permeated with the same great principle. 

 Upon the Bahama islands it is manifested on every hand. The 

 want of soil to cover the nakedness of the rocks finds material, 

 though not full compensation, in a climate so happily constitu- 

 ted that life exists and thrives largely upon air. 



Mr. Charles Burnside (Avhoso kind and obliging attentions we 

 are glad of this opportunity to gratefully acknowledge) took us 

 to the coral limestone quarry upon his premises, to which we have 

 already referred, from which, for a hundred years or more, stone 

 has been taken for building purposes — including stone for the 

 Royal Victoria Hotel. On tlie floor of that quarry, bottomed 

 upon rock, and upon nothing else, we saw in full and lusty vigor, 

 a wild fig tree, a species of the banyan, which in forty years had 

 attained a great size, its many large branches towering high up 

 in the air with a lateral spread of about eighty feet. It was full 



