2 EAMBLES 03? A NATUEALIST. [Oh. I. 



The great drawback of this route, to a person not travelling 

 on business which requires despatch, is the restless rapidity 

 of movement which allows of no quiet, except on the calm 

 days at sea. When at length, after an interval of a few such 

 days, land is reached, he catches a glimpse of a comitry, it 

 may be the most interesting he has ever visited ; but in a few 

 hours, almost before he can realize that it is not a pleasant 

 dream, inexorable necessity attracts him once more to the 

 ship, and he turns his back upon the new country, it may be 

 for ever — its people, its vegetation, its scenery, leaving the 

 impression of an unreal vision upon his memory, which will 

 endure as such as long as he lives. 



I can only compare the passage overland to the picture 

 patterns seen in a kaleidoscope, changing with such rapidity 

 that the impression of one is stUl vivid when it is succeeded 

 by another, while yet each picture is complete in itself, and 

 has features which distinguish it no less from its predecessors 

 than from its successors. Or I might liken it to a series of 

 dissolving views, in which the eye still dwelling upon the 

 last and recently formed picture, finds it replaced by some 

 other and contrasting one, when another port is reached, 

 which gradually, by the force of its present reality, drives 

 out of the miad (for the time) the one which has for some 

 days occupied all its thoughts. Thus we change the verdu- 

 rous Delta for the arid desert plain — and this again for the 

 piled-up, barren rocks of Arabia — which in tm-n give place to 

 the green and smiling fertility of the palm groves of Ceylon, 

 and the scarcely less luxuriant islands of Penang and Singa- 

 pore. 



The vine-clad hills and olive groves of the south of France, 

 and the tall flower stems of the great thick-leaved aloes about 

 Marseilles, were hailed as some foretaste of that luxuriance 



