122 Scientific Intelligence. 
then appeared like a little short and broad cone high in the clouds, or 
rather, as an opaque triangular spot on the firmament. It is difficult to 
imagine this, the culminant point, to be that mighty mass, at whose base 
the toil-worn traveller pauses; when, having surmounted four-fifths of 
the mountain, his heart quails at beholding a * Pelion upon Ossa piled” 
so sternly, so stony and so steep. 
Much and deeply did the officers of Captain Ross and Trotter’s Ex- 
peditions deplore the necessity of hurrying from this spot, so inter- 
esting to the sailor, it being the point to which every circumnavigator 
first steers, and from whence, with chronometers carefully corrected at 
its well-determined position, he takes his departure. For years, too, 
this was the prime meridian; distance in longitude at sea being reck- 
oned from Teneriffe as zero, by all the seafaring nations of Europe at 
one period: and by some it is so still. From the days of the earliest 
circumnavigators, to’ the present, “we sighted the Peak of Teneriffe 
marks that page in the narrative, at which all that is interesting in the 
voyage commences. : 
In the history of geology, the Canary Islands hold a conspicuous post- 
tion: von Buch developed his theory of craters of elevation from what 
he there observed: his name too recalls, and most appropriately, that 
of his fellow-laborer in the same shores, Christian Smith, the amiable 
and gifted Swede, who first after Humboldt, explored their botany. 
Christian Smith returned to Europe to embark in the ill-fated Congo 
Expedition: when he again saw the Peak of Teneriffe, he welcomed it 
as a familiar object, and bade it adieu, rejoicing that a still more novel 
field of inquiry was opened to him, beyond this scene of his early exer- 
tions. A few short months terminated his life and hopes: like Vogel, he 
fell a victim to the dreaded fever of the pestilential coast of Africa: 
like him, too, he was a martyr in the cause of botanical science. 
Possessed of so many and such touching associations, no paturalist- 
voyager can see the Fortunate Isles rising, one by one, on the horizon 
of the mighty Atlantic, without some feeling of melancholy, while re- 
flecting on the fate of these his two predecessors, both most accom- 
Aner naturalists of their age and day; and whose prospects and 
opes were in every respect as bright, perhaps brighter, than his own. 
e excellent and beautiful work of Mr. Webb, on the Natural 
History of the Canaries, leaves little to be said, especially of their 
botany ; and renders even an enumeration of the few species gathered 
by Vogel and the Botanist of the Antarctic Expedition unnecessary 5 for 
they were all collected within a few miles of Santa Cruz, during @ 
very hurried walk, and scarcely include a dozen kinds. This locality 
fore-shortened to the view from seaward, presents a progressive inc 
and steep gullies with which the slopes are everywhere cut 
edge of a saw, producing that spotty effect in the landscape so ac 
mirably transferred to the phytographical illustrations of. the work allu- 
