CHAPTER XVII
THE MALAY PENINSULA AND JAVA, 1911
In the autumn of 1911 I arranged with Professor Shirasawa, who visited me during the Anglo-Japanese Exhibition, to visit the island of Formosa, where the finest Cypress forest in the world is found, and where the close resemblance of the fauna and flora to those of Sikkim made the island particularly interesting to me. Mr. W.R. Price, who was much interested in botany, agreed to accompany me and to stay on there during the summer of 1913 and collect the plants, which were very little known except to the Japanese. We left England in December and reached Port Said on the nth. Whilst the steamer was coaling I visited the Government slaughter-houses, where live-stock from various ports in the Levant is quarantined and inspected before slaughter, and found the veterinary surgeon in charge, Signor Magni, very obliging in telling me about the curious collection of live-stock which I found there. Sheep from Alexandrctta, and probably bred in the Taurus mountains, were a breed about as large as Scotch blackfaces, with long coarse wool, mostly white, with faces and legs black or mottled with black and brown. Their ears were drooping and from five to seven inches long, and their tails rudi¬ mentary, with large fatty masses surrounding them, so that no tail was visible. There were no rams, but the wethers had only short horns, and the ewes none,
Another lot from Cyprus were of the same type and colour, but had shorter and less drooping ears, and tails in some cases reaching to the hocks, in others almost to the ground. The rams of this breed had large horns, of the Welsh or Merino type, and the ewes had short horns in some cases, Signor Magni told me that he had once seen a ram here with seven horns, of which four were large and the others small, but he thinks that four-horned sheep are not a distinct breed, but only occur occasionally,
The cattle were of various types, some a small long-haired, brown or red breed, like stunted Ayrshires, from the mountains of Asia Minor; some a small variety of the humped Indian cattle which he said came from Bagdad. There were many buffaloes from some part of Mesopotamia, which were fatter and seemed to have endured the journey better than the cattle, which were lean and would not be considered fit to kill in England.
After a very pleasant and calm voyage, we landed at Penang on December 29th and visited the Botanic Gardens, which were being transferred from the Government to the Municipality, much to the regret of the Malay superintendent, who spoke excellent English and seemed a very capable gardener. The most striking tree I saw in flower was Spathodea, and Dacrydium excelsa, a Malayan conifer, was in fruit. There were a few interesting orchids, Vanda Hookeriana, and two terrestrial species, Cypripedium niveum and C. bellatulum, of great beauty, from the island
of Langkawi, where they grow on limestone rocks. I sent some of
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