trees is seen at a lofty elevation, succeeding to the verdure of the forest. Except where discouraged by the thin granitic soil, these beeches occur everywhere; and, except when stunted by the winds, they attain a goodly size; and one trunk is mentioned seven feet in diameter. But any tourist who expects a repetition of our own Buckinghamshire in the forests of Fuegia will be wofully disappointed. Our woodland scenery owes all its charm to its park-like variety, where clumps of many kinds occur; and where, from the sylvan labyrinth, you easily emerge on smooth pastures and smoking hamlets. But it is a very different thing to land from a boat direct in the thicket, and after struggling to the top of a Mount Tarn or a Mount Buckland, to look down on an expanse of silent greenery, only broken by shipless arms of the sea; and any one who has spent many weeks among the pines of the Black Forest or the Arbor Vita swamps of the Mississippi, will understand what an incubus on the spirits a monotonous vegetation becomes. In Tierra del Fuego the only variegating incident is "the bursting of the leaf and flower-buds of the deciduous beech from their resinous gummy scales; when a delightfully fragrant odour pervades the woods;" and the explorer may be occasionally rewarded by coming on a Winter's Bark or some less usual tree.

* Hooker's Flora Antarctica, p. 348.

Land animals are few. Even insects are rare; and such flies and beetles as occur, are inconspicuous and uninteresting creatures. Like Ireland, Fuegia is exempt from serpents, and even frogs have been expelled by its St Patrick. "The gloomy woods are inhabited by few birds; occasionally the plaintive notes of a tyrant fly-catcher may be heard; and more rarely the loud strange cry of a black woodpecker. A little duskycoloured wren hops in a skulking manner among the entangled mass of the fallen and decaying trunks. But the creeper (Oxyurus Tupinieri) is the commonest bird of the country. Throughout the beech forests, high up and low down, in the most gloomy, wet, and impenetrable ravines, it may be met with. This little bird no doubt appears more numerous than it really is, from its habit of following, with seeming curiosity, any person who enters these silent woods; continually uttering its harsh twitter, it flutters from tree to tree, within a few feet of the intruder's face. In the more open parts, three or four species of finches, &c., and several hawks and owls, occur." * Most curious of all is the existence of a hummingbird (Mellisuga Kingii) on the shores of this wintry realm; and which, even amidst the showers of snow, has been observed flitting about in search of the insects, equally hardy, that lurk in the blossoms of

* Darwin's Voyage round the World, chap. xi.—one of the most charming and instructive journals ever published.

the Veronica and Fuchsia. The most important quadruped is the guanaco or llama, that useful compromise between the sheep and the camel, so characteristic of the South American mountains. It is found on Navarin Island, and on the main island, or, Tierra del Fuego proper. In summer shy and vigilant, the want of pasture drives it in the winter down to the valleys, where its slender legs slump into the snow, and make it an easy capture. Two species of fox occur, and these, with a few small rodents of the mouse and bat families, complete the inland zoology of this inhospitable region.

But the waters largely compensate for the lifelessness of the land.. With its colossal sea-weeds, Fuegia might well be the paradise of fishes. Το say nothing of many beautiful varieties which are dredged up from the rocks or washed ashore by the tides, these coasts are the head-quarters of the Lessonia and Macrocystis, the two giants of the ocean Flora. The former is an arborescent seaweed, with a trunk of concentric layers so timberlike, that Dr Hooker mentions a captain who employed a boat's crew two days collecting the incombustible stems for fuel. The Macrocystis, instead of a trunk as thick as an ordinary cherrytree, is moored to the rock by a tough but slender cable, which, rising to the surface, breaks into leaves, and then streams along a luxuriant tangle for several hundred feet. The Victoria water-lily requires a tank and hot-house for its special accom

modation; but a prime Macrocystis would need a tank a hundred feet deep, and as long as Westminster Abbey. In general, however, its cable is only a few fathoms long, and as its streamers wave over every inundated rock, it is at once the buoy and the breakwater of these dangerous channels. The "moored kelp" warns the mariner of a sunken rock, and if in stormy weather his little vessel can only get to leeward of its floating acres, he may set the wildest sea at defiance.* In this way has Providence not only supplied the means of safety in the very midst of danger, but, by the same arrangement, he has prepared a source of subsistence for this land of famine. These gigantic seaweeds are the home and the pasture-field of countless mollusks and crustaceans. The leaves are crowded with shell-fish. The stems are so encrusted with corallines, as to be of a white colour. And " on shaking the great entangled roots, a pile of smail fish, shells, cuttle-fish, crabs of all orders, sea-eggs, star-fish, and crawling nereidous animals of a multitude of forms, all fall out together." † To such a well-stored larder it is not wonderful that shoals of fishes should resort, forsaking for it brighter but less bountiful waters; and in the wake of these fishes come armies of seals and

* For beautiful figures and many interesting particulars regarding these and the other Algae of Fuegia, the reader is referred to Dr Hooker's magnificent work, the "Flora Antarctica."

+ Darwin.

clouds of sea-fowl. Among the latter are shags, petrels, ducks, red-bills, sea-pigeons, geese, steamerducks, and penguins. Of these many species have their breeding-places on the cliffs of the desolate islands. With their black coats and yellow waistcoats, the substantial and yeoman-like penguins take up their abode on the grassy flats; and in the month of January, that is to say, at their mid-summer, a braying quack may constantly be heard from morning to evening, inviting to dainty morsels their fat and solemn fledglings,—a dinner-bell which is never silent in the populous "penguinery." Not improbably with sinister designs on the infant penguins, the sea-lion is fond of a walk among the tufts of tussac, and, along with the sea-otter and the porpoise, this tyrant of the Southern Ocean is the great terror of the larger fishes. Predaceous

as are the habits of so many of these creatures, it is interesting to contemplate the skill and profusion with which a sea so unpromising is peopled. All are ultimately dependent on a seemingly worthless sea-weed. That fucus cherishes the worms and polypes, the crabs and corallines, which feed the fishes; and these, in their turn, sustain legions of cormorants and penguins, of seals and porpoises, as well as the less dexterous human fishers on the shore; so that Mr Darwin is probably correct in his surmise, that the felling of a tropical forest would not be so fatal to animal existence as the destruction of this gigantic "kelp." "O Lord,