80 DR. O. STAPF ON THE FLORA OF MOUNT KINABALU. 
Another peculiarity of the climate is the small amount of insolation which the slopes 
and the bottoms of the valleys and even the ridges receive. After three hours’ sunshine 
they get only dispersed light, and not very much of that, as a very great part of the light 
must be absorbed by the thick belt of mist hovering above or resting upon them. This 
state of things is naturally intensified on the western, north-western, and south-western 
sides of the mountain, where the sun rises too late over the huge granite mass to 
shine long on the deep and narrow valleys, and some of the hillsides exposed to the 
north certainly never receive even an hour’s sunshine. 
II. GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE VEGETATION. 
A. ZONES OF ALTITUDE AND BOTANICAL FORMATIONS. 
Relying on the reports of the travellers, and the dried material before me, I distinguish 
roughly the following zones of altitude on Kinabalu :— 
1. The zone of the plains and low hills, or briefly the hill zone, from the litoral zone 
which skirts the coast as a belt of varying breadth up to 3000 feet. 
2. The lower mountain zone, from 3000 to 6000 feet. 
3. The upper mountain zone, from 6000 to 10,500 feet. 
4. The summit zone, from 10,500 feet to the very summit (13,698 feet). 
l. The Hill Zone (up to 3000 feet). 
I have taken up in the present paper only the flora of that part of the hill zone 
which forms the very foot of Kinabalu, beginning at the village of Koung, at an 
altitude of 1600 feet, with the exception of a few plants from the Ulu (upper) Tawaran. 
This is the inhabited part of Kinabalu, almost entirely occupied by cultivated land 
and secondary forest (* young jungle") which springs up rapidly from the clearings as 
soon as they are abandoned. "Towards the coast, part of the plains and hillsides are 
covered with lalang-lalang, but this does not reach the foot of the mountain. The 
primary forest (“old jungle") is hardly at all represented within the limits of this zone. 
The secondary forest is, like the primary forest, essentially evergreen, and has, of course, 
all the characteristics of a true tropical forest. 
The descriptions contained in the travellers’ reports do not attempt any philosophical 
classification of the vegetation from a physiognomical and biological standpoint, and 
they are too vague and incomplete to allow the reader to form more than a very general 
idea of the differentiation of the vegetation, nor can the dried material and the notes 
attached fill this gap. I must limit myself therefore—here and later on—to a few 
remarks concerning those principal formations which I find distinetly recognizable. 
These are, in the hill zone:— 
a. The Secondary Evergreen Tropical Forest |“ Young Jungle ”].—I find 40 
phanerogams and 7 vascular eryptogams referable to this formation. "Three of the pha- 
nerogams are trees, 21 shrubs, 7 climbers, and 8 herbs. Not one of these is mentioned 
&- anywhere as particularly striking or forming a prominent feature in the physiognomy 
of this forest, if we except two species of Bauhinia and perhaps Mussenda coccinea, which 
attract the traveller's attention by their extremely showy flowers, and a few large ferns. 
Xe there must be here, as anywhere else, a number of species which are more pro- 
