884 REPORT—1890. 
when the whole southern shores of the Mediterranean will enjoy the same prosperity 
and civilisation as the northern coast, and when the deserts, which are the result. 
of misgovernment and neglect, will assume the fertility arising from security and 
industry, and will again blossom as the rose. 
It cannot be said that any part of the Mediterranean basin is still unknown, if 
we except the empire of Morocco, But even that country has been traversed in 
almost every direction during the past twenty years, and its geography and natural 
history have been illustrated by men of the greatest eminence; such as Gerhard Robhlfs, 
Monsieur Tissot, Sir Joseph Hooker, the Vicomte de Foucauld, Joseph Thomson, 
and numerous other travellers. The least known portion, at least on the Mediter- 
ranean coast, is the Riff country, the inhospitality of whose inhabitants has given 
the word ‘ruffian’ to the English language. Even that has been penetrated by De 
Foucauld disguised as a Jew, and the record of his exploration is one of the most 
brilliant contributions to the geography of the country which has hitherto been 
made. 
Although, therefore, but little remains to be done in the way of actual explora- 
tion, there are many by-ways of travel comparatively little known to that class of 
the community with which I have so much sympathy, the ordinary British tourist. 
These flock every year in hundreds to Algeria and Tunis, but few of them visit the 
splendid Roman remains in the interior of those countries. The Cyrenaica is not 
so easily accessible, and I doubt whether any Englishmen have travelled in it since 
the exploration of Smith and Porcher in 1861. 
Cyrene almost rivalled Carthage in commercial importance. The Hellenic 
ruins still existing bear witness to the splendour of its five great cities. It was 
the birthplace of many distinguished people, and amongst its hills and fountains 
were located some of the most interesting scenes in mythology, such as the Gardens 
of the Hesperides and the ‘ Silent, dull, forgetful waters of Lethe.’ 
This peninsula is only separated by a narrow strait from Greece, whence it was 
originally colonised. There,and indeed all over the eastern basin of the Mediter- 
ranean, are many little-trodden routes; but the subject is too extensive; I am 
reluctantly compelled to restrict my remarks to the western half. 
The south of Italy is more frequently traversed and less travelled inthan any 
part of that country. Of the thousands who yearly embark or disembark at 
Brindisi, few ever visit the Land of Manfred. Otranto is only known to them 
from the fanciful descriptions in Horace Walpole’s romance. The general public 
in this country is quite ignorant of what is going on at Taranto, and of the great 
arsenal and dockyard which Italy is constructing in the Mare Piccolo, an inland 
sea containing more than 1,000 acres of anchorage for ‘the largest ironclads afloat, 
yet with an entrance so narrow that it is spanned by a revolving bridge. Hvyen 
the Adriatic, though traversed daily by steamers of the Austrian Lloyd’s Company, 
is not a highway of travel; yet where is it possible to find so many places of interest 
within the short space of a week’s voyage, between Corfu and Trieste, as along 
the Dalmatian and Istrian shores, and among the islands that fringe the former, 
bes it is difficult to realise that one is at sea at all, and not on some great inland 
lake ? 
There is the Bocche di Cattaro, a vast rent made by the Adriatic among the 
mountains, where the sea flows round their spurs in a series of canals, bays, and lakes 
of surpassing beauty. The city of Cattaro itself, the gateway of Montenegro, with 
its picturesque Venetian fortress, nestling at the foot of the black mountain, Ragusa, 
the Roman successor of the Hellenic Epidaurus, Queen of the Southern Adriatic, 
battling with the waves on her rock-bound peninsula, the one spot in all that sea 
which never submitted either to Venice or the Turk, and for centuries resisting the 
barbarians on every side, absolutely unique as a medisyval fortified town, and 
worthy to have given her name to the argosies she sent forth; Spalato, the 
grandest of Roman monuments; Lissa, colonised by Dionysius of Syracuse, and 
memorable to us as having been a British naval station from 1812 to 1814, while 
the French held Dalmatia ; Zara, the capital, famous for its siege by the Crusaders, 
interesting from an ecclesiological point of view, and venerated as the last resting- 
place of St. Simeon, the prophet of the Nunc dimittis; Parenza, with its great 
