one and a half inches long and had greenish segments with a pink labellum; it has now been named Var. formosana by Hayata. Its nearest ally is Vanilla Griffithii from Assam. The plant has grown at Kew and in my own orchid house for six years, but has not yet flowered. All the orchids I collected in Formosa were taken to Japan and handed over to the care of Count Foukouba, who is the most successful orchid-grower in Japan, and who was good enough to send me some of them later.
At Urai, where a river comes in from the east, we crossed a bridge to a large police station on a very pretty site, with some hot springs on the other side. This would be one of the best centres from which to explore the surrounding mountains, if the district was considered safe. But the police would not let us go far from the path, and followed us about every¬ where. There are large camphor distilleries up the main valley and a forest of Libocedrus which I should have much liked to see, but our hosts did not seem to think it was possible to go there at present. Many coolies were going backwards and forwards, and I saw women carrying loads of bamboos on their backs just like Lepcha women in Sikkim. Rattan palms, wild bananas and Aroids were all abundant in this fine forest, but none of the stemless palms which I saw in Horisha. The hillsides were very steep, and a waterfall opposite was well photographed by Pi ice, I also found a fine Alpinia in flower which I have grown in England, Alpinia Elwesi [Bot. Mag., t. 8651), and a Liparis with large brown flowers (Bot. Mag., t. 8797). Altogether I got fifteen species of orchids in flower in this valley, and Price found a very curious new scitammous plant. Butter¬ flies, all of common Himalayan genera, were also fairly abundant, but I had not time to collect birds, though I saw a brown dipper, Cinclus manila, just like the Himalayan dipper.
On April 1st I got back to Taihoku, and after packing my collection of timber specimens, which made quite a large consignment, I paid a farewell visit to the Governor-General to thank him for all the facilities he had afforded us.
I was invited by the Oriental Society of the island to address a large audience on what we had seen in the island, and though I said that my stay had been too short to form anything more than hasty impressions, which my ignorance of the language must make unreliable, they pressed me so strongly that I did not like to refuse, especially as Mr. Myoshi said that he would translate my words sentence by sentence into Japanese. At the end of the meeting, at which a number of officials in uniform and professors at the College were present, I was asked to sign my name in the visitors 5 book and to add some sentiment. On the spur of the moment I could think of nothing better than a text in the Bible, the truth of which I had been feeling daily, as my increasing age made me less able than formerly to get about the steep mountain paths on foot. I wrote from the Psalms:
"The days of man are threescore years and ten, and, though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow.”
Though many of those present understood English, more or less, they did not seem able to take in the meaning of this verse, which seemed plain
