154 POPULAR GEOGRAPHY OF PLANTS. 



ever will we enter the Holy City, but we will bend our 

 steps towards the Mount of Olives. The only Olive-trees 

 now standing there, grow near the foot of the mountain, 

 and, from their enormous thickness, it is thought probable 

 that they are the same which stood there when our Lord 

 was upon earth. "They are eight in number, at least 

 eighteen feet nine inches in circumference, and from twenty- 

 eight to thirty-one feet in height." 



There is a thorny shrub growing in the Holy Land, from 

 which the Crown of Thorns is said to have been made, 

 called Paliurus aculeatus ; it is " a light, elegant-looking 

 shrub when it puts forth its new leaves in the spring, but 

 of a savage appearance in the autumn, when its leaves are 

 dried and discoloured, and its branches covered with a pro- 

 fusion of little round orange-coloured, flat seed-vessels, like 

 little bucklers. It has small pale greenish-yellow flowers, 

 growing in little stalked clusters. The leaves are furnished 

 at the base with a pair of sharp, slender thorns, which, upon 

 the old branches are curved outwards, and become so strong 

 as to render hedges made from the plant impenetrable."* 



Reeds grow in profusion on the Jordan, and no doubt also 

 near the brook Cedron ; reeds like those we remember in that 



* From Lindley's c Ladies' Botany,' 



