80 ISLES OF SUMMER. 
fortunately relieved, however, from all obligation to ‘‘ dress and 
keep it.” If we had the learning of an old and experienced 
botanist, we should have seen too much. As it was, we saw as 
much as, untrained and unpracticed, we could well master, or 
describe in a single chapter. A few pen-photographs of some of 
the more striking floral scenes and pictures which we witnessed, 
may communicate to our readers something of the interest and 
pleasure which the reality produced upon the mind of the author. 
The first impression was one of astonishment at finding upon 
such almost naked rocks anything above lichens and the smaller 
and simpler forms of vegetable life. But nature is never as un- 
just or partial as she often appears to the casual observer. When 
she withholds with one hand, she, with the other, is busy 
dispensing lavishly her gifts. The principle of compensation 
exists everywhere throughout her wide domain. Human life 
and human experience teem with evidences of this great and 
universal truth, while the material world, in all its varied and 
wondrous forms, is permeated with the same great principle. 
Upon the Bahama islands it is manifested on every hand. The 
want of soil to cover the nakedness of the rocks finds material, 
though not full compensation, in a climate so happily constitu- 
ted that life exists and thrives largely upon air. 
Mr. Charles Burnside (whose kind and obliging ere we 
are glad of this opportunity to gratefully acknowledge) took us 
to the coral limestone quarry upon his premises, to which we have 
already referred, from which, for a hundred years or more, stone 
has been taken for building purposes—including stone for the 
Royal Victoria Hotel. On the floor of that quarry, bottomed 
upon rock, and upon nothing else, we saw in full and lusty vigor, 
a wild fig tree, a species of the banyan, which in forty years had 
attained a great size, its many large branches towering high up 
in the air with a lateral spread of ‘about eighty feet. It was full 
