on a flat plain four or five miles across, and surrounded by hills 5,000 or 6,000 feet high. Heavy rain came on before we reached the small town Horisha in the centre of this plain, and stopped at a good Japanese inn. On March 16th we had intended to go to Maibara, where there is a police station twelve miles from Horisha, near to where a tribe of aborigines live, but it rained so heavily that we gave up this excursion. Some of their women we saw in the town. Their mouths and cheeks were tattooed in a very peculiar manner.
At Horisha we found two more collectors from one of whom I bought a nice lot of butterflies in papers, a pair of Swinhoe pheasants’ skins and a pair of the beautiful Pitta nympha, a species also known in South Japan, where, as here, it is only found as a summer migrant. I also found some interesting wooden trays made from sections of the stem of a climb¬ ing species of Bauhinia, and fine walking-sticks of a wood like holly, which Kanchira could not name. In the afternoon we visited a large sugar factory with new machinery made in Germany, which must have been got here with great difficulty on such very small trucks as the light tramway will carry. On the next day the weather was still dull and rainy, but cleared up at eleven when we went seven miles down the valley of the Nankan river to Hokozanko, where we found lodgings in a police station. In this valley there was a great flood last year, which had broken the road in many places and obliged us to climb over a very rough path. In the afternoon I collected some birds, including a Drongo, Chaptia brauniana , and a rock thrush, and saw traces of Swinhoe pheasants, for which Kikuchi set traps. Next day I collected more birds, a green barbet, Cyanops nuchalis, a fruit-pigeon, and an Arboricola, and two fine Swinhoe pheasants were caught in the snares. Price and Kanehira took a long walk in the forest but did not find any trees of special interest, except Pinus formosana and Podocarpus,
On March 19th we marched ten miles down the valley. At first it was fine, but heavy rain came on at noon. We had not had a single sunny day since leaving ICagi, but most of the rain had fallen at night. In this central part of Formosa the wet and dry seasons do not seem to be nearly so well marked as they are in the north end of the island, where the rain mostly falls in the north-east monsoon, or in the south where most of it comes with the south-west monsoon between May and September. At Kishto, where wc passed the night in a small Japanese inn, the stream joins a larger river and opens out into the plain five miles lower down. Here we found a tramway, which took us about twenty miles through a level country, mostly under rice, to Taichu, a town on the railway, where we dined, and went on to Taihoku in the evening. From March 21st to 25th we spent at Taihoku, drying and packing our collections of plants and bird-skins. The weather was very changeable, sometimes hot, some¬ times windy, sometimes dull and cold with drizzling rain. I made an excursion to Tamsui, where in the Consul’s garden I found a fine Lily in flower, which differs from Longiflorurn with much narrower leaves, and brown or reddish stripes on the back of the petals as in L. Browni. It is common on the hills near Tamsui and bears as many as seven or eight flowers on a stem. I found the same or a very closely allied
