44 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY the East brought to its ports all the finest wares of India and China. " Almeria," says the author already quoted, **is an opulent and magnificent city, whose fame has spread far and wide. God has endowed its inhabitants with various gifts, such as a temperate climate and abundance of fruits ; they are handsome, well - made, good-natured, very hospitable, very much attached to their friends, and are above all things very refined in their manners, and very elegant in their dress. Its coast is the finest in all the Mediterranean as well as the safest and the most frequented." Its inhabitants were said to be the wealthiest in all Andalusia, and they would appear to have somehow solved the problem of creating a manufacturing town without loss of beauty, for all authors vie with one another in extolling the charm and picturesqueness of the town. It had no less than a thousand public baths, and for forty miles the course of the river, " which contributed no little to the ornament of the city and the environs," was "through orchards, gardens, and groves, where singing birds delight with their harmony the ears of the traveller."

All the towns of the Arabs had public gardens planted with groves of fine orange, pomegranate, and other trees, of which the remains are still to be seen in the Alamedas of Southern Spain. Abdurrahman I. was "passionately fond of flowers." He planted beautiful gardens, to which he brought all kinds of rare and exotic plants and fine trees from foreign countries. He introduced good systems of irrigation. His passion for flowers and plants led him to send agents to Syria, India, and other countries with a commission to procure him all sorts of seeds and plants, many of which he successfully acclimatised in the royal gardens, and this custom, followed by his successors and adopted by the rich, led to the introduction of many fruits and plants previously unknown even to cultivated Rome. Among these, cotton, rice, the sugar - cane, the pomegranate, and the peach may be mentioned, but many of our garden vegetables have also come to us from the same