10 CAGAYAN SULU. [chap. 



vegetation, or perched far out of sight in the forks of some 

 gigantic tree overhead. The explorer who penetrates the true 

 primeval forest in a country such as Borneo finds himself at the 

 bottom of a subarboreal world, if I may be allowed the expression, 

 with whose surface all communication is absolutely cut off. Yet 

 it is just there that all life, whether animal or vegetable, centres. 

 The tiny lorikeets are feeding on the figs or other fruit, and the 

 Arachnotheras searching the corollas of some hea\dly-blossomed 

 tree for their insect prey. But they are almost out of sight, and 

 far beyond the range of the gun of the naturalist. Beneath, the 

 forest seems gloomy, dank, and devoid of life. Everything is 

 fiirhtincr for the sun and air, in which alone most flowers will come 

 to perfection, and could we only transform ourselves into monkeys, 

 and swing from branch to branch a couple of hundred feet from 

 the ground, we should doubtless get a much more favourable idea 

 of the richness of the flora of the tropics than our limited powers 

 of locomotion permit us to obtain at the foot of the trees. The 

 fact remains, however, that but few flowers present themselves 

 to the eye, and those who expect to find the blaze of colour that a 

 field of buttercups exhibits in England, or an anemone-clothed hill 

 in Greece, will, as Mr. Wallace and other naturalists have already 

 told us, be much disappointed. But every one who sees tropical 

 vegetation for the first time must be struck by the great variety of 

 tint in the foliage. At home our trees have but little range in the 

 gamut of green. Here they run from a falsetto of vi^ad greenish- 

 yellow to an ut de ijoitrine of a colour that is only just not black. 



"We steamed across to the eastern side of the crater, and made 

 the launch fast to a huge fallen tree which jutted far out over the 

 water. It was half buried in the rich soil at one end, and was 

 covered with a wealth of ferns and epiphytes. Above us a large 

 creeper with inconspicuous whitish flowers had attracted an 

 enormous quantity of yellow butterflies, which were apparently 

 limited to that one spot. They were far beyond our reach, and, from 

 a collector's point of view, might just as well have been in the other 



