useful in helping to fix the
soil on sandy flats, such as those near Cape Town, and the bark of one
species is an important article of commerce in Natal, where (near
Maritzburg, for instance) it grows profusely. But of all the immigrant
trees none is so beautiful as the oak. The Dutch began to plant it round
Cape Town early in the eighteenth century, and it is now one of the
elements which most contribute to the charm of the scenery in this
eminently picturesque south-west corner of the country. Nothing can be
more charming than the long oak avenues which line the streets of
Stellenbosch, for instance; and they help, with the old-fashioned Dutch
houses of that quaint little town, to give a sort of Hobbema flavour to
the foregrounds.

The changes which man has produced in the aspect of countries, by the
trees he plants and the crops he sows, are a curious subject for inquiry
to the geographer and the historian. These changes sometimes take place
very rapidly. In the Hawaiian Islands, for instance, discovered by
Captain Cook little more than a century ago, many of the shrubs which
most abound and give its tone to the landscape have come (and that
mostly not by planting, but spontaneously) from the shores of Asia and
America within the last eighty years. In Egypt most of the trees which
fill the eye in the drive from Cairo to the pyramids were introduced by
Mehemet Ali, so that the banks of the Nile, as we see them, are
different not only from those which Herodotus saw, but even from those
which Napoleon saw. In North Africa the Central American prickly-pear
and the Australian gum make the landscape quite different from that of
Carthaginian or even of Roman times. So South Africa is
changing--changing all the more because many of the immigrant trees
thrive better than the indigenous ones, and are fit for spots where the
latter make but little progress; and in another century the country may
wear an aspect quite unlike that which it now presents.

[Footnote 4: I owe these names to the kindness of the authorities at the
Royal Gardens at Kew, who have been good enough to look through
fifty-four dried specimens which I collected and preserved as well as I
could while travelling through Mashonaland and Basutoland. Eleven of
these fifty-four were pronounced to be species new to science, a fact
which shows how much remains to be done in the way of botanical
exploration.]

[Footnote 5: It has been plausibly suggested that one