Notes of a tour in the plains of India, the Himala, and Borneo: being extracts from the private letters of Dr. Hooker, written during a government botanical mission to those countries / [Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker].

  • Hooker, Joseph Dalton, 1817-1911.
Date:
1848-1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Notes of a tour in the plains of India, the Himala, and Borneo: being extracts from the private letters of Dr. Hooker, written during a government botanical mission to those countries / [Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    or Art, and worthy of a much longer visit than we were able to make to it. But I must first speak of Lisbon and the “ Golden Tagus/' in both of which objects, however, I was grievously dis¬ appointed. The former, like almost every object in Portugal, looks best from a distance. Its long rowTs of white-washed houses show filthy on a near approach; and the magnificent palaces of the old nobility are sinking, like their owners, to decay. Civil war has brought poverty in its train. In all the shops splendid jewellery and fine plate are offered at prices infinitely below their value, for money is not to be had. The streets are generally steep, and with hardly any exceptions very narrow: a few consist of houses eight or ten stories high; and here and there you come upon public gardens, enclosed with handsome and lofty railings. The suburbs are very extensive, and they swarm with wretched beggars and herds of quarrelsome dogs, alike annoying to the stranger. I saw no good trees near Lisbon, only Olives, Evergreen Oaks, Orange, Pomegranate, and the great Batura. We made an ex¬ cursion to Cintra, fourteen miles distant, and losing our road, wandered among the low, rounded and bare hills, among which the Tagus winds its way. I was not sorry for the mistake and delay, for they enabled me to see more of the country. Vegetation was most scanty; the plants were all but burnt up, a few Euphor- bias, Genistas, and Bupleura, some Astragali, and an unsightly Centaurea, alone remaining. In a village, to which we wandered and whence we were directed to the right path four or five miles distant, the scenery was prettier, for I saw water, green grass, groves of Olives, Vineyards, and scattered woods of Oak. Here and there were white convents with gay gardens roimd them. The hills showed a few Stone-Pines, bent by the winds, and in the bottom of the valley grew Weeping Willows and Arundo Phragmites (P). The agriculture is most slovenly, and the fields are enclosed with rough stone walls: the roads are not much better of their kind, being rugged and dusty, and adorned, at every mile or so, with the pile of stones and a cross, of which I need not explain the meaning. The only objects which struck me as curious and peculiar, are the windmills. Without having seen