them. The lecturer concluded with remarking that any doubter would be convinced of a First-Cause or Supreme Being by only examining the eye; and it was, he said, that cavillers rarely attacked natural history.
A Lecture on Spain, in connection with the Institution was delivered to a crowded audience on the 22nd of Feb. by F. North Esq. M.P., he having visited that country with his talented daughter the afterwards great painter and traveler, who in her charming “Recollections of a Happy Life” says “We let the house at Hastings for that summer [1859], and wandered off abroad, starting by way of Jersey for the Pyrenees and Spain, returning in an English ship from Cadiz to the Thames on the 3rd of Jan. 1860. It will thus be seen that the lecturer’s visit to Spain was quite of a recent date, and that his interesting description had an up-to-date freshness. He first adverted to the condition of Spain as a country that had been almost blotted out from the political map of Europe for some centuries, but had now made a fresh start and was progressing; it had consequently become of peculiar interest at that moment. His object was to give a few sketches of its character and its people derived from his own recent residence among them. Spain was a stony land, and over much of its surface it was barren, except where the water supply was utilized in irrigation. On the southern coast the most extraordinary fertility showed itself. In that part the vine, the olive, rice and the sugar-cane all flourished, as well as the graceful date-palm, the banana, and all the varieties of the orange tribe. The last-named thrived from Valentia to Gibralta(sic) as orchard trees and were very beautiful when wildly growing in the open fields, whilst its fruit – green and golden – hung at the same time with perfumed blossoms. The olive was a less picturesque object, rather that of a ragged-looking evergreen oak, and its grey foliage had almost a wintry appearance. He saw them harvesting its fruit on the 23rd of December last, the manipulation of which was coarse – almost disgusting. After the oil had been extracted by pressure, it was stored in enormous pear-shaped crockery-pots of some ten feet in height, half of which were buried in the ground to withstand the pressure of their contents. It was in such pots as these in which were hidden the forty thieves of the well-known story; and, positively, he had seen oil-jars in which could be hidden with ease half a dozen of the biggest thieves of the world. They were exactly in the shape of the old Roman amphora. The oil was mostly sent to market in bags of skin hung on the backs of donkeys. He entered Spain by way of Catalonia, at the south-east corner of the Peninsula, and he knew of nothing that more strongly marked the primitive character of its population than their method -
