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 1n Hone Kona. 
THE Gardener'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 formation of ice varying in quantity from a thin coating on the 
upper leaves of pine trees growing at 300 feet above sea-level, toa 
thick encasement of perfectly transparent solid ice of 54 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 Dendvobium aggvegatum 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 
