four or five feet in height, and bears one to three large trumpet-shaped sweet-smelling white flowers, which do not differ from those which I have grown in England from the North-West Himalayas. The Crinum is found in dry soil on the ridge leading down to the Tista bridge among Sal trees; the bulbs of it which I took home in 1881 did not succeed well in cultivation, though perhaps this was owing to want of heat and too much moisture in the resting season. A pretty little pink-flowered plant, Didymocarpus mortoni, was a great ornament to shady wet rock, on the face of which it clung at 4,000 to 5,000 feet, but this, like so many of its Eastern congeners, is too fugacious to be suitable for general cultivation in England, like the American Gesneraceæ which it represents in the Himalayas.
On August 13th we started early to cross the Tista before it got very hot, as though the weather had been wet and cloudy for some weeks previously, the valley is always extremely hot during the rainy season. We walked down the four miles of steepish descent to the bridge, along a good broad path through the stunted Sal trees, on the branches of which Ærides odoratum, Dendrobium and other orchids were here and there to be seen; but the accessible trees near the road have been much denuded of their showy orchids by the Lepchas who hawk them about Darjeeling, where they soon perish. Costus speciosus was the showiest flower I saw on the descent, but some fine Gingers and other Scitaminous plants are abundant along the road, though not now in flower.
On reaching the river at 8 a.m. I remained for three or four hours to collect butterflies, Paul going on alone. The sun did not come out till 11 o'clock, but I found many nice Hesperidæ, Lycænidæ and a few Papilios of the commoner species. A fine female of Neope Bhadra, the only tropical member of its genus, was taken; and a pair of the large grey Sphinx moth were clinging together on a rock where they were difficult to see. T went down the river a couple of miles, and found the road much damaged by landslips, but it was being repaired under the inspection of a babu whom I found quartered in the well-built wooden bungalow which is kept up at the bridge for the use of European officers and travellers. He gave me something to eat, and told me that, though he did not suffer from fever whilst down at the river, he usually had an attack on returning to Darjeeling; and I should advise no one who can avoid it to sleep there between the months of April and November. The fine new iron suspension bridge which now spans the Tista is a great improvement on the old cane bridge by which I crossed it on the same day of August sixteen years before when starting for Tibet with Blanford. What this bridge cost no one but the Public Works Department can say, but there is no doubt that much money was wasted on the heavy iron castings which were brought out from England to carry the wire ropes, but, proving unsuitable, lay rusting by the path. The carriage of any ironwork of this sort over footpaths by coolies is always very difficult, but the engineers in India are, or were, often too fond of ignoring the conditions under which such works must be carried on, and insist on having everything on the same elaborate and expensive scale as if they were in England.
After breakfast I mounted my pony to ascend the long steep zigzags
