432 Lieut.-Colonel N. Manders on the 
gorge of Salazie being a good coach road for some twenty 
miles. This is the tinest gorge it has been my good 
fortune to visit in any part of the world. It is a rift in 
the crater, and a geologist would have no difficulty in 
tracing the course of the erupting lava from the volcano to 
the sea. Now ariver occupies the bottom of the rift, and 
the jungle-covered precipices, mostly almost perpendicular, 
with innumerable waterfalls of over a thousand feet in 
height, makes the drive out of great interest and beauty. 
I did not netice many butterflies here. The gorge is so 
extremely narrow that there is very little sunshine, and I 
was disappointed, as, although I did not expect many 
species, I fully anticipated a great number of individuals. 
Cilaos is at a higher elevation, 4,000 feet, and access is 
difficult. One is usually carried up in a chair on the 
shoulders of a succession of stalwart porters, for a distance 
of something like thirty miles. The road or rather track 
is cut out of the steep hill-side, which being composed of 
shale is constantly slipping down, with the result that it is 
not at all uncommon for large portions of it to be carried 
away. It is far too narrow for wheeled traffic, and indeed 
one’s chair frequently overhangs a clear drop of several 
hundred feet in a manner distinctly alarming. Con- 
sequently in Cilaos horses and cattle are unknown, life is 
primitive and I should think deadly monotonous, the only 
diversion so far as I could judge being a stroll to the 
neighbouring chalybeate spring for a draught of water. 
The forests, once so extensive as to cover the whole central 
area, are being rapidly destroyed. Dr. Jacob, who has 
resided in the island for fifty years, told me that he 
remembered when the whole of the Salazie district was a 
beautiful forest, and when the Bourbon starling (Fregilupus 
varius) was quite common. ‘This bird has now been extinct 
for five and twenty years, and the forests are following it. 
The flora is im many respects different from that of 
Mauritius, and I should say that a Microlepidopterist 
would make most interesting discoveries at the higher 
elevations. Unfortunately illness almost entirely ruined 
any chances I had in this direction. 
The late Dr. Vinson, Curator of the Natural History 
Museum, St. Denys, made two lists of the buttertlies of 
Bourbon, one in 1891, the other in 1896; both are out of 
print and difficult to obtain. They contain many interest- 
ing notes, and I have made them the basis of the present 
