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Botanical Notices from Java. A7 
grassy surface still remains entirely the same, and this even in districts 
at present uninhabited by man. How can this be explained except 
by the operation of earlier cultivation, which in a short time destroys 
with fire and axe what nature can only create anew in centuries? It 
appears however that there is no cause for apprehending that the sanc- 
tuary of the higher forest tracts, lying at above 5000 feet, will ever be 
destroyed; partly because the want of water renders it difficult to 
dwell there, as the springs in most of the Japanese mountains rise 
below this region, generally at a height of 3000 feet, and often much 
lower; partly also because the Japanese, who love warmth, would 
be deterred by the great damp and coldness of those tracts, where 
for the greater part of the year the heights are enveloped in clouds, 
and where neither rice nor cocoa palms (their chief source of food) 
thrive ; not to mention the steepness of the acclivities. 
“We soon reached the highest limits of the young coffee-plan- 
tations, which are here laid out among the forest-trees, and we 
now entered the moist shady cover of the primitive forests, which 
clothe the increasingly steeper acclivities. Oaks (Quercus pruinosa 
and depressa, Bl.) and arborescent Melastome prevail in company 
with a species of fir (Podocarpus amara, Bl.), which became more 
and more plentiful as we ascended. Our way led us over a narrow 
steep ridge, which in some parts was scarcely a foot wide, and de- 
scended abruptly on both sides into deep rocky clefts; it would per- 
haps be impossible to climb over it, were it not, like everything here, 
overgrown with the most luxuriant forest-trees. Above this dan- 
gerous pass, the Podocarpus amara occurs more plentifully than in 
other districts, and gives to the woods a peculiar appearance ; their 
trunks, which at the base are frequently more than six feet in dia- 
meter, rise perpendicularly from fifty to seventy feet, and separate 
high up into the round branched and leafy crowns: when the wind 
sighs through their ntedle-shaped foliage, and moves the whitish 
lichens which hang down yards long from all their branches, one 
might fancy he saw presented to him amorthern winter-scene. Con- 
tinually mists drift past, in which the thermometer falls from three 
to five degrees. 
“In this region, at about the height of 6000 feet, where the gigan- 
tic firs gradually become less frequent, we begin to meet with a small 
tree (Hedera divaricata, Jungh.) which gives to the forests a peculiar 
character, and whose habit involuntarily recalls to mind that of 
Dracena. From a short, knotty stem, often scarcely two to three 
feet high, spring many simple, undivided boughs, which attain a 
length of from twenty to thirty feet, and diverge on all sides ina 
straight or slightly curved direction, so that the outermost nearly 
attain a horizontal position. ‘They are almost everywhere of the 
same thickness, naked, and only covered at their ends with blossoms 
_and buds and with large petiolated leaves. 
“The higher we ascend the smaller do the trees become, and 
we meet with Podocarpus imbricata, Bl., a species of fir, which 
covers many of the steepest acclivities, and whose young juni- 
per-like (almost pyramidal) trees present to us here, nearly under 
