82 Borneo. 



For the fii'st few miles our path lay over a country clear- 

 ed for rice-fields, consisting entirely of small but deep and 

 sharply-cut ridges and valleys, without a yard of level ground. 

 After crossing the Kayan River, a main branch of the Sa- 

 doug, we got on to the lower slopes of the Seboran Mount- 

 ain, and the path lay along a sharp and moderately steep 

 ridge, affording an excellent view of the country. Its features 

 were exactly those of the Himalayas in miniature, as they 

 are described by Dr. Hooker and other travellers, and looked 

 like a natural model of some parts of those vast mountains 

 on a scale of about a tenth, thousands of feet being here rep- 

 resented by hundreds. I now discovered the source of the 

 beautiful pebbles which had so pleased me in the river-bed. 

 The slaty rocks had ceased, and these mountains seemed to 

 consist of a sandstone conglomerate, which was in some 

 places a mere mass of pebbles cemented together. I might 

 have known that such small streams could not produce such 

 vast quantities of well-rounded pebbles of the very hardest 

 materials. They had evidently been formed in past ages, by 

 the action of some continental stream or sea-beach, before 

 the great island of Borneo had risen from the ocean. The 

 existence of such a system of hills and valleys reproducing 

 in miniature all the features of a great mountain region, has 

 an important bearing on the modern theory, that the form of 

 the ground is mainly due to atmospheric rather than to sub- 

 terranean action. When we have a number of branching 

 valleys and ravines running in many different directions within 

 a square mile, it seems hardly possible to impute their forma- 

 tion, or even their origination, to rents and fissures produced 

 by earthquakes. On the other hand, the nature of the rock, 

 so easily decomposed and removed by water, and the known 

 action of the abundant tropical rains, are in this case, at 

 least, quite sufficient causes for the production of such val- 

 leys. But the resemblance between their forms and outlines, 

 their mode of divergence, and the slopes and ridges that di- 

 vide them, and those of the grand mountain scenery of the 

 Himalayas, is so remarkable that we. are forcibly led to the 

 conclusion that the forces at work in the two cases have been 

 the same, differing only in the time they have been in action, 

 and the nature of the material they have had to work upon. 



