colonists or officials seem able to speak the local dialect fluently. The menu was of the usual Chinese type; some excellent xissoles of prawn, and the delicate thin-skinned boiled dumplings, which to my taste are the chef-d’œuvre of Chinese cookery, were fit for a king's table. The meal was washed down by excellent Shamshu, a Chinese wine rather like sherry negus, and Formosa tea, which has a peculiar flavour, not so much to my taste as Chinese or Indian tea, and is mostly exported to North America. In the evening we dined with the Governor-General, who gave us an excellent European dinner, and, though he only spoke Japanese, seemed much interested in the objects of our visit.
On February 10th we started by rail for Kagi, a large town 180 miles south, passing through a country where all the level plains are cultivated with rice and sugar, and the dry hills covered with bamboo and scrub, interspersed with small patches of tea. At Kagi we found a much warmer temperature and a good Japanese inn, and on the next day went to see a party of the aborigines who had come down from the mountains of Arisan to see the Governor. They seemed very varied in type, some being more like Malays, and some big stalwart men whose legs were protected by deerskin gaiters. One had a type of face strongly resembling a North American Sioux Indian, and some of the women had nice open faces and were not at all bad looking.
As it was a fete day, we could not start for the mountains, and therefore visited the Experimental Garden where various kinds of rubber-yielding trees were being tried. The climate is evidently not sufficiently tropical for Para rubber, which looked sickly, though an indigenous rubber identified as Ecdysanthera utilis was thriving. In the public park we saw Teak trees, only four years planted, which looked well and were 20 feet high, whilst an older one, eight to ten years planted, was 36 by 2 feet. Some crosses of Devon and Ayrshire bulls with the native cows were kept here, and good pigs by a Berkshire boar from a native sow, which is very hardy and prolific; but it was difficult to get exact informa¬ tion as none of the men in charge seemed to know much about live-stock.
On February 12th we started by a narrow-gauge 2½-foot railway for Arisan with Mr. Kanno, the engineer-in-chief of this remark¬ able line, which after going about ten miles over the plain began to climb a steep grade of one in ten up a narrow valley clothed with vegetation, which reminded me of the Sub-Himalayas. Pineapples and areca nut were growing up to 1,500 feet, where the line passes through several winding tunnels; but except for a few camphor trees and a large species of Celtis, there was no timber left below about 3,500 feet, where we came out on a ridge at the end of the line, which as yet was open no farther.
Here we found chairs carried by Chinese coolies—a most agreeable mode of travelling in the mountains. I was able to carry my gun, plant box and butterfly net in the chair, and stop whenever I saw anything interesting to examine or collect. The coolies were most excellent fellows who took great interest in my work and retrieved birds m the jungle or climbed trees to gather plants, almost as well as a Lepcha, when they understood what I wanted. The forest which commenced here was of
