growing among the rotten debris of decayed wood we found a leafless Monotrope, and a single plant, new to science, of one of those beautiful¬ leaved terrestrial orchids (Anæctochilns Elwesi C.B. Clarke) which are the admiration and despair of English gardeners on account of the difficulty of growing them.
I have been somewhat particular in describing the vegetation of this peak, because it was not visited till later in the season by Sir Joseph Hooker, who does not seem to have botanised in these deep glens as carefully as in some parts of the hills, and also because the vegetation of the highest and most undisturbed spots in the whole of the range is always of particular interest and importance from a naturalist’s point of view. The companionship of such an accomplished botanist as Mr. Clarke, whose knowledge of the local flora was so accurate that I could always learn the name of every plant of interest at once, naturally inclined me to pay more attention to the plants than I had lately done since I became specially interested in the butterflies. Though it is difficult, not to say impossible, to collect everything, yet even a superficial knowledge of several branches of natural history often leads to the correct appreciation of difficult points in each of them, and here it was highly interesting to see that the presence of butterflies, found at higher elevations in Sikkim and elsewhere only found in the North-West Himalaya, was accompanied by the appearance of some plants having the same distribution.
I am quite unable to account for the fact, of which several cases are also quoted by Sir J. Hooker, by any difference between the climate of the Khasia hills and that of Sikkim. The situation of the Khasias, which are surrounded on both sides by the hot tropical valleys of Assam and Sylhet, and which are not exposed to the influence of the high snowy range of the Himalaya as Sikkim is, would lead one to expect more tropical rather than more temperate forms of animal and vegetable life at similar elevations, but all that I observed on the plateau of the Khasias is distinctly to the contrary. I am unable to compare exactly the mean temperature of Shillong peak with that of a similar elevation in the outer hills of Sikkim, but I certainly found the climate more bracing, less muggy and much more windy. Probably the absence of the dense forest which covers the Sikkim hills up to 11,000 or 12,000 feet, and the comparative absence of radiation, cause the climate to be more favourable to the upward extension of tropical forms, which is more marked in the outer than in the inner ranges nearer the snow; for in the neighbourhood of Kohima, a station m the Naga hills about 180 miles north-east of Shillong, where the forest is much heavier than on the Khasia plateau, the vegetation more closely resembles that of Sikkim. A letter on this subject from Clarke to Sir J. Hooker published in the Journal of the Linnean Society for 1886, p. 128, is so interesting in its bearing on this subject that I shall quote some passages from it here. Writing from Kohima on October 10th, 1885, Mr. Clarke says:
