LETTERS FROM JAMES MOTLEY, ESQ. 43 
large quantities of the gum, though none of the best quality, on the 
Indragiri. I think I can distinguish at least five sorts, which are pro- 
bably the produce of different trees, or rather five classes of gums, for 
perhaps the species are many more, and yet, though I offered great in- 
ducements, I could not get even a leaf: of course if I had gone up 
with time at my disposal, I would have seen the trees in spite of all, 
for I should have gone into the woods with the collectors, and this I 
hope some time to be able to do. The Gum Benjamin, another great - 
staple here, I saw collected ; the trees are about eighteen inches dia- 
meter, with small low buttresses to the roots; these are notched with 
a chopper, and produce the ordinary quality of the drug: the best, of a 
light buff-colour and dense substance, is procured from wounds in the 
uncovered larger roots, and the common or foot benjamin is procured 
from the trunk of the tree; the oil of the seeds is valued as an appli- 
cation to boils; it is probably of little use.—J. M. 
TO W. MITTEN, ESQ. 
Singapore, 1854. 
My dear Mitten, —When I last wrote you, I promised to give you 
some account of my late trip to Sumatra, and I now sit down to fulfil 
that promise. The river I went up, the Indragiri, joins the sea on the 
east coast of Sumatra in about 35' south. It has four or five mouths, - 
all of the size of large rivers, and between them are large islands, per- - 
fectly flat and hardly above water, covered with Nipa Palm, Mangroves, 
Avicennia, and other such amphibious plants; if there is anything else in — 
the centre of them, which is unlikely, it will never be known, for they — 
are too large to traverse in a day, and no human being could live a night — 
in them from mosquitoes and miasma, though they are inhabited by — 
myriads of wild pigs and monkeys. 
As you get a little further inland, these plants give way to an- 
other species of Mangrove, a very elegant plant, with long drooping 
branches like a willow, and rose-coloured flowers, which bears an eatable 
acid fruit, and grows in the water like Mangrove; it is an Anacardia- 
ceous plant, with corky-skinned fruit, and very venomous juice. A little 
palmate-leaved Palm is also very common, and a few Orchidee begin to 
appear on the trees; this is the region of the freshwater tide, after 
passing which, a tated difference takes place in the — from. 
