90 SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 



dinner that would have been considered good in Washington. It 

 was a special treat, prepared by Mr. Nagase, who had been i8 years 

 in the United States, had served with Dewey at Manila, and then on 

 the Mayflower, where he had talked with Presidents McKinley and 

 Roosevelt. After dinner he called, and expressed his good will to 

 the country he had served so long. 



We crossed the divide at Nokosan, elevation about 10,000 ft. On 

 the way I became more and more filled with admiration for the 

 plucky Japanese officers who have brought standards of living into 

 this wild land that do them infinite credit. They do the beautiful car- 

 pentry of their stations, using the trees in the forest as their raw 

 material ; they construct the carefully graded mountain paths, often 

 blasted out of the face of the gorges; they build the wire suspension 

 bridges that carry a footway of from one to three narrow boards ; 

 and they teach the native schools — all this in addition to their primary 

 duty of keeping order. One whom I met had made a good herbarium ; 

 another, Mr. Mitsui of Raishya, whom I met later in South Formosa, 

 had compiled an admirable dictionary of the Paiwan language which 

 would be a genuine contribution to knowledge if it could be published, 

 especially if it were romanized and included English as well as Japa- 

 nese equivalents. 



The mountain flora of Nokosan included many familiar boreal 

 genera, which gave way, as we descended, to subtropical types, the 

 whole transition being seen in a day's march. We got our botanical 

 collections in order at Hori, where we were entertained by the genial 

 Mr. Saito, Head of the Forest Experiment Station of the University 

 of Hokkaido. (Each Japanese university has its own Formosan 

 forest reserve and experiment station.) Mr. Saito is a butterfly en- 

 thusiast, and when he learned that we were returning to the moun- 

 tains to climb Niitakayama (Mt. Morrison) he decided to join us. 

 On the way to the top of the Japanese Empire we made very inter- 

 esting collections, and saw the shy and attractive Tsuo tribe, who 

 build little sacred houses of the skulls of the animals they kill in the 

 chase. Our baggage carriers on this trip were the more primitive 

 Bunun, the least engaging, perhaps, of the Formosan natives. We 

 reached the summit, at about 13,400 ft., and made good collections. 



My last trip into the mountains was to the Paiwan village of 

 Raishya, reached from Heito, the southern terminus of the railroad. 

 On the way we had the interesting experience of fording a Formosan 

 river several times. Although shallow, the water was so swift that 

 its impact made it almost impossible to get one's foot to the bottom. 



