Generally speaking, everywhere, excepting in the northern low lands and in a few favoured spots in the hilly districts, the vege tation is scanty. In inner Persia the hills and plains are bare of trees, and steppe and desert predominate. The date-palm thrives well as far north as Tabbas in latitude 33° 36' and at an altitude of 2,00o ft. and in the south extensive date-groves, producing excellent fruit, exist at altitudes of 2,000 to 5,00o ft. The olive is cultivated at Rudbar south of Resht in Gilan, and a few iso lated olive-trees have been observed in central and southern Persia.
Of fruits the variety is great, and nearly all the fruits of Europe are well represented. The common, yet excellent melons, water melons, grapes, apricots, cherries, plums, apples, are within the reach of the poorest. Less common and picked fruits are expensive, particularly so when cost of transport has to be considered ; for instance, a good orange costs 2d. or 3d. in Tehran, while in Mazandaran (only ioo m. distant), whence the oranges are brought, it costs *d. Some fruits are famous and vie in excellence with any that European orchards produce ; such are the peaches of Tabriz and Meshed, the sugar melons of Kashan and Isfahan, the apples of Demavend, pears of Natanz, figs of Kermanshah, etc. The strawberry was brought to Persia about 1859, and is much cultivated in the gardens of Tehran and neighbourhood; the rasp berry was introduced at about the same time, but is not much appreciated. Currants and gooseberries are now also grown. The common vegetables also are plentiful and cheap, but only a few, such as the broad-bean, egg-plant (Solanum melongena), onion, carrot, beetroot, black turnip, are appreciated by the natives. Nearly all the European garden flowers can be seen.
Fauna.—W. T. Blanford, after a journey taken in 1872, divided Persia into five zoological zones : (I) the Persian pla teau, from the Kopet Dagh southwards nearly to Lat. 28 N., including all Khorasan up to the Perso-Afghan border, its western limit being indicated by a long line to the north-west from near Shiraz, taking in the whole of northern Persia west of that line to the Elburz and the Russian frontier; (2) the provinces south and south-west of the Caspian; (3) a narrow strip of wooded country south-west of the Zagros range, from the Diyala R. (then in Turkey in Asia, now in Iraq) to Shiraz; (4) the Per sian side of the Shatt-el-Arab, and Arabistan (now Khuzistan) east of the Tigris ; and (5) the shores of the Persian Gulf and Baluchistan.
The fauna of (I) he described as "Palaearctic, with a great prevalence of desert forms ; or perhaps more correctly, as being of the desert type with Palaearctic species in the more fertile regions." In the Caspian provinces he found the fauna, on the whole, Palaearctic also, "most of the animals being identical with those of south-eastern Europe." Some, however, were essentially indigenous and he observed "a singular character given to the fauna by the presence of certain eastern forms, unknown in other parts of Persia, such as the tiger ; a remarkable deer of the Indo-Malayan group, allied to Cervus axis; and a pit viper (Halys)." Coupling the A. k-forests of Fars with the wooded slopes of the Zagros, he found as regards his third division that however little known was the tract, it appeared to contain, like the second, "a Palaearctic fauna with a few peculiar species." As to the 4th division, Persian Mesopotamia, he considered its fauna, as far as he wag in a position to judge, to belong to the same Palaearctic region as Syria. The 5th and last division, Baluchistan and the shores of the Persian gulf, presented, he considered, among those animals common to it and to the highlands, "for the most part desert types, whilst the characteristic Palaearctic species almost entirely disappear, their place being taken by Indian or Indo-African forms." Blanford wrote in 1876, but his work is out of date only in matters of detail.
Among the mammals, it is to be feared that the lion, fairly plentiful in places, at the time he wrote, is now practically extinct (1929), no live specimen being in existence in captivity and no authoritative report of its occurrence having been received for some years past.
The Mazamdaran tiger though not so plentiful as of yore is still to be met with. There was at one time a disposition to regard it as a distinct race on the score of smallness of size and paleness of colour, but the character of specimens obtained in recent years by Colonel R. L. Kennion hardly supports that theory. The same officer's sporting activities have also demonstrated that the wild sheep of Persia are separable into two if not three races : one found on the southern slopes of the Elburz identical with the Armenian moufflon (Ovis orientalis) ; a second on the north of the range, of the urial or shapu type ; and farther eastward in the Kopet Dagh range another race of the urial type but distinctly bigger and described by Dr. Lydkker as Ovis vignei arkal.