PREFA CЕ. WITHIN the last twenty years considerable additional light has been thrown on the Natural History of the Holy Land, and it would scarcely have been fair to the subject or to the purchasers of the present series had we failed to take advantage of it; hence the references to tourists who have travelled, and to facts which have been ascertained, since 1845. For the sake of the additional information, our readers will forgive the seeming anachronism. This and the two following lectures are to all intents new. Should any desire to follow out the subject more fully, they will find ample materials in the new Dictionaries of the Bible, as well as in Lady Callcott's Scripture Herbal, and Professor Balfour's Plants of the Bible. The botanical articles in Principal Fairbairn's Imperial Bible Dictionary were contributed by the author of the following lectures, and a few meditations on kindred themes will be found in a little volume entitled Emblems from Eden. April 1864. THE CEDAR AND THE PALM. THE ПHE tallest trees in the world, and perhaps the oldest, are the pines which were lately found on the Sierra Nevada, or Snowy Ridge, of California. Of the style in which these giants start up from the soil, and brave the elements, you may form some notion from the specimen in the Crystal Palace. It is only the lower portion of a trunk, or rather the bark which covered it to a height of ninety feet; but so thick is this bark (from a foot to eighteen inches), that the tube at Sydenham weighs sixty tons. Lengthen this fragment fourfold, and you have the height of a full-grown Wellingtonia gigantea. The Monument is 202 feet in height, and from the base of St. Paul's to the top of the cross is exactly twice this elevation, or 404 feet. The Wellingtonia, which has been named "The Green Mountain State," is 350 feet in height, and another, called "The Father," which was blown over many years ago, and which is now a fragment of only 300 feet in length, is calculated to have reached 450 feet in the days of its integrity. In other words, from such a tree, without any trouble, you might have made two Monuments, the one on the top of the other; or, setting it up as a flag-staff in Paternoster Row, the ensign would flutter far above the top of St. Paul's. The hollow trunk would make a capital case for holding an entire assortment of such trifles as Pompey's Pillar and Cleopatra's Needles. The cone-bearers (conifera), to which the mammoth-tree of California belongs, not only include the stateliest specimens of vegetation, but, with their usually dark and persistent foliage, they are a peculiarly grave and solemn order. A fine sight is a tall pine clinging to the side of an Alpine cliff, and carrying the eye straight up into the blue and boundless heaven; and the Scotch fir, with its stem of burnished copper, and its boughs tossed and twisted all about in wild and careless strength, whether it be in Greenwich Park or on Hayward's Heath that we meet a specimen, we never encounter him in his battle for life, bearing up against the elements, and extracting a subsistence from the scanty soil, without hailing our compatriot as a credit to his country. But, on the principle "too much of a good thing," a pine plantation becomes very oppressive. After a month's sojourn in the depths of the Black Forest, we remember how glad we were to escape again into the cultivated country; and even the spruces of Norway, with all their grace and nobleness, need the occasional flight of a deer, or the flushing of a capercailzie, to relieve their sombre monotony. The dreariest wilderness in all the world is a forest of arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis), such as occurs on the banks of the Mississippi, and where, for hundreds of square miles, scarcely a sound can be heard, and through all the “dismal swamp" there is nothing to be seen except a succession of the self-same dull evergreens shutting out the light from brown or brandy-coloured pools infused with the fallen leaves. Several coniferous trees are found in Palestine, and as we ascend the slopes of Lebanon they become more numerous. Pre-eminent among them is the CEDAR. In our remarks on the trees of the Bible, we begin with the example which may claim to be king of the forest. Like the lectures of the royal botanist, ours shall set forth "from the cedar-tree that is in Lebanon," even although we should not reach "the hyssop that springeth out of the wall." We do not know who was the pilgrim from Palestine who |