10 DR. HOOKER'S MISSION TO INDIA. 
India: at Aden the Arabs, I was told, preferred the Calotropis, pro- 
bably because it was most easily procured. 
At breakfast I met Mr. Mackenzie, who had served in the '* Hecla,” 
during the search after my old commander, Sir James Ross, and his 
uncle, and who had also been in an Expedition to fix the position of 
the South Shetlands, when first discovered. Mr. Watkins was long a 
resident in Assam, and the first agent of the Tea Company there: he 
assures me that the introduced Chinese plant is exclusively used, and 
called Assam Tea. Three crops are gathered every year, of which the 
first is much the best; but the produce of all is mixed together for 
export. The largest native Assam Tea tree attains a height of forty 
feet, with a trunk eighteen inches in diameter. 
After breakfast Mr. Williams and myself started after the camp to 
Gyna, twelve miles distant; and I mounted an elephant, for the first 
time since you lifted me upon one at Wombwell’s show, good twenty 
years ago. The docility of these animals is an old story, but it loses so 
much in the telling, that their gentleness, obedience, and sagacity seemed 
as strange to meas if I had never heard or read of these attributes. 
At the word of command my elephant knelt down, and I crawled or 
rather clomb up by his hind foot, or ear, and reached a broad pad, or 
in plain English, a mattress, lashed to his back, holding on by the 
ropes as he rose, and jogged off at an uncomfortable shuffling pace 
of four or five miles an hour, and (I took the trouble to count) forty- 
five paces a minute. The swinging motion, under a hot san, is very 
oppressive, but to be so high above the dust is an unspeakable 
comfort. The Mahout'or driver sits cross-legged on the shoulder, 
and guides him by poking his great toes under either ear, enforcing 
nce with an iron goad, with which he bammers the unhappy 
beast's head with quite as mucli force as you use to break a cocoa-nut, 
or drives it through his thick skin down to the quick. A most painful 
sight it is, to see the blood and yellow fat oozing out in the broiling 
sun from some dozen holes in his poor skull. 
Our elephant was an excellent one, when he did not take obstinate 
fits, and so docile’ as to pick up pieces of stone if desired and with a 
jerk of his trunk throw them over his head for the rider to eatch, thus 
saving the trouble of dismounting. - This is geologizing in true Oriental 
style, and no traveller's tale, I assure yon. 
Of sights on the road, unfrequented though this noble line is, there 
