CAIEO : GAEDENS AND DESERT 227 
vegetation beyond annuals, and the majority of these are 
planted. 
Still it was ' really and truly the Dropmore of Egypt,' ' a noble 
project ' struggling against adverse conditions. 
Everywhere you turn you are greeted by some English 
or well-known exotic, struggling to accommodate itself to 
Egyptian bondage, or rebelliously resenting all poor Mr. 
Traill's kind attentions, and doing the worst a slave can do, 
dying on the spot, and breaking his master's heart. (To 
W. J. H., December 24, 1847.) 
Far more interesting was a trip into the Desert to the Fossil 
Forest. 
Though few plants were to be had, I was anxious to make 
a few observations on the temperature of the soil and dry- 
ness of the desert, so that I might know how near the starving 
and burning point vegetation would exist, as supplementary 
to our many observations in the Ant. Expedition of how 
much cold they could bear. 
Completing these a few days later by other experiments at the 
halfway house to Suez, he found that 
even in the winter time the sun's rays give a heat of 100'^ 
to the soil, so that the poor plants have to undergo in winter 
a change of 56° every day. Here the only water they get 
is by the dew forming during the night. Unhappy plants ! 
if their feehngs are like ours, who like to drink best when 
most heated. 
The waste of rolled pebbles and fragments with here and 
there huge trunks, heaped together in the greatest confusion, 
all chalcedony and coarse agate, reddish brown against the 
white of the desert sand, inspires a long disquisition on its 
geological origin and a smile at Mehemet Ali, for 
At this place the Pasha had sunk a pit for coal : sapiently 
concluding that so much fossil wood above ground indicated 
no less below : he, however, did not get through the limestone 
rock, which is subjacent to the formation to w^hich I presume 
the fossil wood to belong. 
