and sunny but the air fresh, like a June day in England, but soon after going out at seven next day it began to drizzle and turned into a regular wet day.
The forest was composed mainly of very old camphor trees with large spreading limbs, and an undergrowth of bamboo, Aucuba and herbaceous plants, among which I noticed an Alpinia with scarlet seeds, which afterwards proved to be Alpinia japonica. A fine Arisæma was in flower, with numbers of the tall stems of Liliim cordifolium with seed pods of last year, Polygonatum, violets, and a Vaccinium with white berries. Camellias and Magnolia Kobus were both in flower, Machilus Thunbergii and Cephalotaxus occurred sparingly. In the interior of the forest we found a small camphor still near a tree which has been photographed as an illustration for a book published by the Forestry Department as the largest wild tree of the species. It had a double trunk about 30 feet in girth, and may have been 100 feet high. It must be very old, but it seems uncertain whether these trees are the remains of a natural forest or were planted centuries ago. Pinus Thunbergi is the only conifer common in this district, where it attains a large size. Juniperus rigida was common on the drier hillsides, and the wax tree Rhus succedanea, oranges and cherries were cultivated trees common here.
We walked back to the station in the rain and after lunch were met by a local forester, who took us to Umi, where there is a very old temple called Umihachiman, supposed to have been built about a.d. 100 to commemorate the birth of a son and heir to Queen Bingo, a very cele¬ brated person in Japanese history.
In the grounds of this temple are some camphor trees of extraordinary age, which the chief priest, Mr, Aoki, assured us were older than the temple itself, and which are the finest trees of their kind that I saw. The biggest has a trunk 42 feet in girth, which seems sound, though its upper branches are dying back. The spread of the branches is about 50 by 30 yards, and the roots at the ground are thirty paces round. The other tree looks older, as a large part of its trunk is decayed and hollow, but new sound wood is growing over the decayed part, as happens in old yew or chestnut trees. On one side is an immense burry growth, and measuring round this the girth of the tree is about 50 feet. Another younger but very fine tree was about 100 by 30 feet. As it came on to rain hard, the chief priest entertained us with tea and cakes, until it was time to catch the train for Hakata, a large town on the east coast, where we slept in a good hotel.
On April 10th, we went by train to Kagoshima at the south of the island, a nine hours 1 journey through a beautiful country, especially the latter half of the journey where the line ascends the valley of the Kinnagawa river. On both sides were steep hills formerly covered with forest, which has been cut and replanted with Cryptomeria and other trees. After two hours we came out into a peculiar country where the hills were bare and open, except in the narrow valleys which were filled with evergreen forest like the sholas on the Nilgiri hills, of which this country somewhat reminded me. At a pass about 2,000 to 3,000 feet Pinus Thunbergi was thinly scattered and the large-flowered Anemone like our Pulsatilla, but
