Note 179 — Chapter III

I am not aware of any evidence to show that Malta had any woods of importance at any time since the cultivation of cotton was introduced there; and if it is true, as has been often asserted, that its present soil was imported from Sicily, it can certainly have possessed no forests since a very remote period. In Sandys's time, 1611, there were no woods in the island, and it produced little cotton. He describes it as "a country altogether champion, being no other than a rocke couered ouer with earth, but two feete deepe where the deepest; hauing but few trees but such as beare fruite. * * * So that their wood they haue from Sicilia." They have "an indifferent quantity of cotton wooll, but that the best of all other."—Sandys, Travels, p. 228.