PART v. VEGETABLE AND ANIMAL LIFE. 61 



natives, roaming over wide, burnt-up plains, and dying 

 for want of the smallest rain -shower, which refuses for 

 months together to fall through the parching air, and 

 from " clouds without water." All this occurring, because 

 with both of those western coast-lines of great southern 

 continents, their general wind blows off the land behind 

 them, while a cold ocean current from the Antarctic Pole 

 flows continually in their front, giving off no sensible 

 amount of watery vapour, even under a blazing zenithal 

 sun. 1 



1 This may be the proper place at which to introduce some further 

 remarks which I have been requested to make on Mr. Milne- Home's excel- 

 lent Memoir, in part alluded to in the note on p. 28. The object of that 

 Memoir was useful, generous, philanthropic viz. to make an island, Malta, 

 with which the promoter had no interested connection, and which is now 

 nearly barren of everything except fortifications and war's alarms, a garden 

 of vegetation like Madeira. The method by which this was to be brought 

 about was by planting trees over all the hilly open country throughout 

 Malta, and an immense number of extracts from authors of repute were 

 collected and methodised, combining to show that trees did possess in them- 

 selves some real power for increasing rainfall, humidity, and- vegetation, 

 wherever they were made to grow on a large scale. But was that power 

 sufficient for the particular case in question ? 



On inquiry from Mr. Milne-Home as to the results of his experiment in 

 practice, I regretted to find that, although the Maltese Government had 

 taken up the subject on the first appearance of his paper with the utmost 

 zeal, and appropriated ,800 a year to carry out the scheme, they dropped it 

 again in two or three years ; and were then found to have been more engaged 

 in making ornamental shrubberies near the towns, than clothing the open 

 hills with trees. So of course no perceptible effect has yet been produced in 

 altering the Maltese climate. 



The general question is, however, one which I used to hear much dis- 

 cussed forty -five years ago in the hot, dry climate of the Cape of Good Hope, 

 by such men as Sir John Herschel, Sir T. Maclear, Dr. Adamson, Charles 



