Botanical Notices from Spain. 251 
lodged on the fifth night, is a pleasant but quite lonely and very 
unsafe table-land, almost wholly covered with Pistacia Lentiscus, 
which gives it a beautiful dark green colour. Among these I found 
single shrubs of Phillyrea angustifolia, Ph. media and Arbuius Unedo, 
the latter loaded with white bunches of blossom. At Puerto-Ser- 
ranos, lying on the Guadalete, which from this point rushes in innu- 
merable windings to the Atlantic Ocean, commences the immense 
broad land of the Guadalquivir. The Sierra de Montellano had still 
to be crossed,—an undulating plateau covered with pistacios and the 
kermes-oak, where I found the shrubby Globularia Alypum, L., in 
flower, and for the first time descried the Atlantic in the distance: 
upon this terrain, extending as far as the little town of Coronil, 
olive-trees and large groups of palms occur. The country from 
Coronil as far as the pleasant town of Utrera is an undulating 
arable land with scarcely a tree upon it, which, as the dried stalks 
showed, may in summer be covered with, in great part, Atractylis 
cancellata. On the 7th. of December I at length rode, in the rain, 
which from that day to the present has continued almost uninter- 
rupted, from Utrera to Seville, five leagues distant, the road to which 
leads almost continuously through olive-groves and forests of Pinus 
Picea. 
The perfectly level environs of Seville, consisting of a sandy 
loamy soil, are said to be clothed in April and May with flowers, but 
I scarcely think the character of the soil is such as to produce any 
very remarkable flora. For, besides that the country is very level, 
it is almost all cultivated, with only occasional patches untilled. The 
heat of the climate of Seville, as I have been assured by Americans 
from the Havannah and Peru, is in the summer not exceeded by the 
glowing heat of the West Indies, and its spring is of short duration ; 
as early as June everything is completely burnt up. In the summer 
a suffocating heat prevails, whilst in winter the air is not cold but 
disagreeably moist,—so moist, that in the chambers, which are 
always on the ground-floor, everything,—clothes, beds, books, paper, 
&c. are in a few hours wet through. This part of Andalusia espe- 
cially, where snow is only known through tradition, is visited by a 
thoroughly rainy season, like the tropics. In spite of all my endea- 
vours, I could not succeed in obtaining any dry paper, so that I 
could only preserve my plants from complete destruction by fre- 
quently turning and shifting them ; for drying them was out of the 
question here, where nothing could be had to obtain artificial heat. 
I took advantage of the few fine days during my stay in the capital 
of Andalusia to make excursions in the neighbourhvod, which at 
first the Guadalquivir, a mile in width, surrounding the whole city 
like a lake, utterly prevented. On the walls and ditches in the im- 
mediate suburbs I found Mercurialis annua, l., and the Calendula, 
which has been before mentioned, frequent ; also in the latter part 
of my stay, on shady grassy spots, Ficaria ranunculoides, a Fumaria 
and a beautiful large-flowered yellow Owalis, together with O. corni- 
culata, frequent and in flower. Under the high corn I saw Veronica 
hederefolia, V. verna, V. arvensis, Lamium purpureum, Capsella Bursa- 
a 
