1893. NOTES AND COMMENTS. 325 



an efficient yearly catalogue, and sets a worthy example to its sister 

 societies, with their accumulated and accumulating capitals, and the 

 additional benefit enjoyed by them of rent-free premises in Burlington 

 House. We look for better things from scientific societies than 

 heavy investments in the Funds. 



Ice in Hong Kong. 



The Gaydene/s Chronicle of April 8 gives some particulars of the 

 unprecedented cold weather which occurred in Hong Kong last 

 January. There is no previous record, says Mr. Ford, the Director 

 of the Botanic Gardens, of ice occurring in the island below 1,700 

 feet, and hence, as it lies within the tropics, the result was most 

 disastrous, indigenous, as well as cultivated, plants suffering. 



" The continued low temperature," he says, " combined with a 

 fall of rain from an apparently warmer stratum of air above, resulted 

 in the formtition of ice varying in quantity from a thin coating on the 

 upper leaves of pine trees growing at 300 feet above sea-level, to a 

 thick encasement of perfectly transparent solid ice of 5^ inches in 

 circumference on the blades and bents of grass at the summit of 

 Victoria Peak." Leaves of evergreen shrubs and trees bore solid 

 coverings of ice three-eighths of an inch in thickness, the great 

 weight of which caused the branches to assume a pendent form, and 

 in many cases snapped off the limbs. All vegetation throughout the 

 hill regions of the colony was covered in this way with ice, as were 

 also most other objects. Telegraph wires had a casing more than 

 half-an-inch thick, and bore icicles three inches long as close as 

 they could be packed side by side, while the windward sides of 

 the walls of the look-out at the peak were sheeted from top to 

 bottom with a perfectly transparent coat three-quarters of an inch 

 thick. All the hills on the mainland and Lantao Island were like- 

 wise white with ice. 



The damage in the Gardens consists chiefly in injury to foliage, 

 but some plants, natives of warmer regions, are quite killed, and many 

 of the decorative plants which survived will be months before they 

 reassume their ornamental appearance. 



In spite of every possible precaution in matting-in the plant- 

 houses and covering the roofs with straw, the contents suffered 

 greatly, many of the best orchids being killed outright, and others 

 so much injured that even if they survive it will be years before they 

 regain their former luxuriance. It is interesting to note that, while 

 a healthy plant of Dendrobium aggregatttm received from Calcutta 

 several years ago is apparently killed, plants of the same species 

 growing by its side, and others on trees where they had no shelter, 

 which were collected ten years ago on the Lo-fau mountains, about 

 sixty miles from Canton, have escaped unharmed. Several exotic 

 trees planted on the hills had all their leaves killed, while above 600 



