in the Malay States, and to attain a height of 240 feet, which is about the utmost height of any trees I have seen or heard of in the Eastern tropics. The tallest I could find was 175 by 12½ feet. A Dipterocarpus which produces a valuable wood known as “Queng,” and Afzelia palembanica, were both fine trees here, averaging about 150 feet, with clean boles of from 60 to So feet, and, like many of the trees in the Malay forests, supported by large spreading buttresses at the ground. A tree known as “ Miribah,” Shorea sp. or Ilopea sp., was being cut for limber, a fine reel wood which may be the same as the Bornean Miribalx. But the multitude of timber trees in these forests is so great, and most of them are so little known to botanists or timber merchants, that it will be long before the Forest Department now established in the Malay Provinces will be able to identify them all, though Mr. Burn Murdoch, Chief Inspector of Forests in the Malay States and Colonies, has com¬ menced to publish, at Kuala Lumpur, a work on the trees of the Peninsula. Some of them are very rare and local, and I was told by Dr. Ridley, the Superintendent of the Singapore Botanic Gardens, that in the small area of forest on which these gardens have been formed he had found three distinct trees which had not been discovered elsewhere.
We drove round the Public Gardens at Kuala Lumpur, which, though only recently formed, are nicely laid out, and contain many handsome palms and ornamental shrubs and plants. Cyrtostachys lakka, a palm with red trunk, and Raphia Ruffia, the palm from which the raffia fibre so much used for tying in English gardens is produced, were noted, also Arenga Saccharifera, which produces the Malacca sugar, used in making an excellent and wholesome sweet dish composed of sago boiled in cocoa- nut milk, which I commend to the notice of residents in the topics.
We went on by rail to Singapore, a journey of twenty-four hours, through country of which a great deal was in a state of nature, though cultivated in patches, and with a few newly opened rubber plantations. We found the Raffles Plotcl a very comfortable and well-managed house, in which parties of globe-trotters were continually coming and going.
Our first visit was to the Botanical Gardens, which, under Dr, Ridley’s able management, have been of immense value to the planting community of the Malay States, and contain a great variety of trees, shrubs and plants, as well kept, as well cultivated, and as well named as is usual in gardens which have been managed by men trained at Kew.
We were shown here the largest tree of the Para rubber, Hevea braziliensis, which exists in the East. It is about 85 feet high by 10 in girth, and has yielded thirty-six pounds of rubber in one year. Great attention has been paid to the selection of seed, and one variety known as No. 240 yields twice as much rubber as the common form. The seed, if packed in the ashes of rice husks, will keep good for a long period, and has been sent as far as British Guiana without losing its vitality. If sown on the surface of the soil it will germinate in two days, and the small seeds are found to be better than the larger ones. A plantation of trees, twenty-six years old, seems to prove that on good soil, with sufficient space for the trees to develop large spreading branches, Hevea will not be so short-lived as it has been on some of the plantations, After seeing several, I
