Khasia hills, where they form perhaps the largest natural order of plants, and he doubts whether in any other part of the globe the species of orchids outnumber those of any other natural order or form so large a proportion of the flora. Balsams are next in relative abundance; over twenty-five species occur, of which many are of great beauty, and two of them, Impatiens salicifolia and I. Chinensis, were then very showy and abundant about Shillong.
In the evening Clarke showed me some of the very numerous plants which he had collected during the last twenty years in Assam, and which already nearly filled a good-sized room. He had, during his sendee in the Education Department of Bengal, been one of the most hard-working and distinguished botanists who ever came to India, and being blessed with an extraordinary constitution and wonderful activity for a man of his age, had botanised over a great extent of country. The number of sheets of plants collected by him amounted to over 50,000, many of them found in the most remote parts of Chota Nagpur, Sikkim, Kashmir, the Naga hills and Manipur. And as during the whole of his career he had been in the habit of laying in and ticketing all his plants when fresh with his own hands, adding sketches and dissections of the most important species before drying them, it may be supposed that his herbarium, which has since been most generously presented to Kew, is of immense value.
On September 14th it rained all the morning, but in the afternoon we walked out to a place called the Farm, four miles from Shillong and 800 feet above it. The road lay through open pine-woods and over un¬ cultivated down-like hills. There was nothing tropical or even Indian in the scenery or vegetation, and though perhaps the species of plants observed belong to tropical genera, the most conspicuous features were not tropical, and many European genera and even species, such as Spiræa Lamium and Agrimonia, were noticed. Among the coarse grass numerous plants of Osbeckia crinita and a pretty pink Melastoma, were flowering, together with a blue Cyanotis, a small Arisæma, A. Leschenaulti, and some terrestrial orchids.
At the Farm there was a nice little bungalow formerly occupied by a gardener, who attempted to form a Government nursery and vegetable garden. Owing to bad management, unsuitable soil and other difficulties, which so often mar the success of well-intentioned but badly organised Government schemes in India, the garden was abandoned, and the bungalow used as a dak bungalow.
Next morning about eight we went along a path leading up to Shillong Peak, as it was then called—a rounded knoll clothed on one side by a small but very dense patch of primæval forest, at a higher elevation than any other in the Khasia hills. It is about 5,000 feet above the sea and commands a wide view over rolling downs and rounded hills which fall somewhat steeply to the north and stretch away in the far distance towards the Jaintia hills on the east and the southern edge of the plateau on the south. I was not fortunate on this or any other occasion in seeing the wonderful view of the Himalayan range which is described with so much detail by Sir Joseph Hooker. Mist or cloud always obstructed the distant
