to carry a heavy load as well; but the Japanese said that it did not matter, as they were only savages and were used to it. I must say that the general attitude of the Japanese officials to the Chinese and aborigines in Formosa was not calculated to make them popular, and I was told that the Chinese settlers were in many places still quite unreconciled to Japanese rule. In three hours from Koshun, over a cultivated plain, we reached a police station at Shiju where we had tiffin and changed bearers, and then went on along the coast under cliffs of black coralline rock, with small patches of rice wherever water ran out of the hills, but the streams are all very low at this season. When we crossed the mouth of a river valley, a mountain called Riryusan came in view about 4,000 feet high and covered with good-looking forest partly cleared by the aborigines. The policeman at Fuko said that these forests had not been visited by any European, and were easy of access, so it might be a much better locality for a naturalist than the Koshun district, where I stayed, seemed to be.
We slept at Bozan, having made about thirty miles during the day; the weather was hot and windy with heavy rain the next morning♦ After a few miles more along the rocky shore we came out on the southern end of Lire great plain which forms the west side of the island, comprised of rich soil irrigated from the rivers and producing large crops of rice, sugar and yams. Large Chinese villages in open groves of bamboo with a few trees of Ficus retusa and Bischoffia javanica are scattered over the plain. At Shiju we changed our chairs for jinrikshas, but the road was so heavy and the wind so strong that we got on but slowly. At Borio we reached the end of a narrow-gauge private railway belonging to a big sugar company, on which we travelled twenty miles to the large town of Ako, where we were met by officials and conducted to a good new Japanese inn. On this day I saw little of interest to a naturalist. A few kestrels, shrikes, magpies, wagtails, buntings and many swallows were the principal birds seen. Egrets appeared for the first time, but I had not yet seen a duck, snipe, pheasant or game-bird of any kind since I landed in Formosa.
On February 23rd Shirasawa took me to see another experimental garden in which rubber and other economic plants were being tried; but here again on a bare, windy down, Para rubber was a failure, as might be expected in this climate, where the temperature goes down to about 50° in winter and the wind is very trying to tropical forest plants. After this we went to see a great sugar factory under the management of a Japanese engineer who spoke English. The machinery was all of the most up-to-date type made by the Milliken Company of New York, and was said to turn out 120 tons a day during the season, which lasts from December till May. There arc 7,000 acres of land growing sugar to supply this mill. The cane was brought in from the field by many miles of permanent and temporary tramways, and four sets of Fowler’s ploughing engines were used to cultivate the deep and fertile soil. I heard afterwards that a good deal of pressure was put on the Chinese farmers to compel them to grow cane by contract at less than its real value. But in Japan it is difficult for anyone but a resident who knows Chinese to get at the truth of these facts, and the Japanese are usually reticent about such matters,
After this I went to Taiwanfoo (called Tainan by the Japanese), where
