and an excellent variety of fruits and esculent vegetables are produced;
indeed, nearly all the vegetables and fruit-trees of Southern Europe are
here abundantly and successfully cultivated, besides those peculiar to
an African clime and soil. In the south, grows a tree peculiar to this
country, the Eloeondenron Argan, so called from its Arabic name Argan.
This tree produces fruit resembling the olive, whose egg-shaped, brown,
smooth and very hard stone, encloses a flat almond, of a white colour,
and of a very disagreeable taste, which, when crushed, produces a rancid
oil, used commonly as a substitute for olive-oil. The tree itself is
bushy and large, and sometimes grows of the size to a wide-spreading
oak. Not far from Mogador are several Argan forests. The level country
of the north is covered with forests of dwarfish oak; some bear sweet,
and others bitter acorns, and also the cork-tree, whose bark is a
considerable object of commerce. In the Atlas, has been found the
magnificent cedar of Lebanon. This tree has also been met with in
Algeria, but only on the mountains, some forty thousand feet above the
level of the sea.

In the South there is, of course, growing in all its Saharan vigour, the
noble date-palm, and by its side, squats the palmetto, or dwarf-palm (in
Arabic _dauma_). Of trees and plants, the usual tinzah, and snouber or
pine of Aleppo, are used for preparing the fine leathers of Morocco.
Many plants are also deleteriously employed for exciting intoxication,
or inflaming the passions.

Morocco has its mines of gold, silver, lead, iron, tin, sulphur,
mineral, salt, and antimony; but nearly all are neglected, or unworked.
Government will not encourage the industry of the people, for fear of
exciting the cupidity of foreigners. A Frenchman, a short time ago,
reported a silver mine in the south, and Government immediately bribed