brownish-red in colour, was in flower. Camellias and a few Azaleas were the only other flowers I could distinguish from the railway. From this pass the line descended through remains of what had been evergreen forest, in which scattered trees of Abies firma remained conspicuous, to the flat cultivated country round the head of the bay on which Kagoshima stands. A more beautifully situated city in a more delightful climate can hardly be found anywhere; the great volcano on an island opposite reminded me of the Bay of Naples. We stayed at a really good and very clean Japanese hotel which had, happily for us, not yet attempted to adopt European style or cooking, and dined in the open air with the music of the frogs, most enjoy ably.
On the next day we first visited an Industrial Exhibition, where I bought some of the pretty Satsuma china-ware made in the district, and some wooden articles made from the beautifully veined and figured wood of the ancient Cryptomeria trees found on the Island of Yakushima thirty miles to the south. Yakushima suqi is celebrated as the finest wood in Japan for picture-frames, and many small articles which the Japanese make so cleverly, and for two planks cut from a very old tree of a rich reddish-pink colour, such as are only found in the virgin forest on this island, I had to pay the timber merchant, who before the eruption of 19x4 had the best stock of this wood, no less than 102 yen (about £10), I also bought from him a very finely marbled burr of Machilus Thunbergi very like Amboyna wood, from which fine table-lops arc made. At the Forestry Bureau we had lunch with the forest officers, who with Mr. Mochizuki’s kind help arranged for Price to make a trip to the Liukiu islands; and for me to visit the forests on the volcano of Kirishima. We then went to the gardens of Prince Shimura in a lovely valley, a mile north of the city. These gardens are a good example of the old-fashioned nobleman’s garden, full of stone lanterns, bronzes, and quaint ponds and tea houses, but I saw no flowers of special interest, except a pure white short-racemed wistaria, % which is called Shirofugi , and a large tree of Podocarpus nageia. Behind the garden was a grove of what I believe to be Phyllostachys mitis , a bamboo which is mainly grown for the edible quality of its young shoots, which, when properly cooked, are a most excellent vegetable, like asparagus with a nutty flavour. Bamboo shoots of other species are largely used for eating in China and at Singapore, and are also made into an admirable pickle. As we came back to the town a boat-race among the students of the college was being held in six-oared gigs, rowed with a very good stroke, and the lookers-on seemed as much ex¬ cited over the race as a lot of English undergraduates.
In the public park on the hill behind the town I saw among a lot of old Camphor trees five specimens of Podocarpus macrophylla , Actinodaphne laurifolia , called Kago-noki by the Japanese, Melia japonica , 80 to 90 feet by 10 feet, Quercus glauca and other trees of South Japan. Then we went to a new Dendrological Institute where Professor Kawagoge, who has published a very interesting list of the plants of Yakushima, gave me a good photograph of the Cycas revoluta which is only found
1 Since introduced under the name of W. brachybotrys , but known now as
W. venusta.
