NA TURK 



361 



THURSDAY, AUGUST 16, 1883 



RECENT TRA VEL IN EASTERN ASIA 

 The Golden Chersonese. By Isabella L. Bird. (London : 



John Murray, 1883.) 

 Across Chryse ; being the Narrative of a Journey of 



Exploration through the South China Border Lands 



from Can/on to Mandalay. By Archibald R. Col- 



quhoun. Two Vols. (London: Sampson Low, 1883. ) 

 Among the Mongols. By the Rev. James Gilmour. 



(London: Religious Tract Society, 1883.) 

 Eight Years in Japan, 1873-1881. Work, Travel, and 



Recreation. By E. G. Holtham, M.Inst.C. E. (London: 



Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co., 1883.) 



WHEN Miss Bird last took leave of her readers, 

 steaming away from the coasts of Japan, her 

 labours and wanderings were by no means over. In 

 this volume she takes up the thread of her narrative 

 exactly where she dropped it in her last book, and 

 we find ourselves with her again just where we parted 

 before, and pay visits first to Hong Kong and then to 

 Canton before starting for the newer ground. If this 

 volume at all falls short in the interest and, we may say, 

 importance of the last, it is owing alone to the Malayan 

 peninsula falling so far short of Japan in both its interest- 

 ing ancient and marvellous modern history. It is as 

 fresh ground as Japan : for of the eastern half of the 

 peninsula nothing is known but the coast line. Yet com- 

 merce promises to open it up ; for the export and import 

 trade of the Straits Settlements amounted together in 

 1880 to .£32,353,000. Ironstone, containing 60 per cent, 

 of metal, is said to be used for macadamising the roads 

 at Singapore ; and the vastest tin fields in the world are 

 found in the western Malay States. 



Miss Bird sailed from a leaden stormy sky on the 

 Pacific into the sunny harbour of Hong Kong to find the 

 town on fire, an incident giving early employment to her 

 graphic pen. Her remarks that, whenever the rocks are 

 quarried there, fever breaks out, is one on which further 

 observations would be valuable. Miss Bird reports also 

 that the Hong Kong hospital doctors have drugs which 

 throw patients into a profound sleep, during which the 

 most severe operations can be painlessly performed, and 

 from which the patients awake without even a headache. 



From Hong Kong she makes an excursion to Canton, 

 where her "admiration and amazement never cease." 

 We must remark that the simple exercise of the faculty 

 of seeing seems to give an unusually intense pleasure to 

 Miss Bird. Further on she describes the rough life she 

 led as "very enchanting," even where she owns that the 

 redundancy of insect and reptile life certainly was op- 

 pressive ! The river population, though looked down 

 upon by the land-dwellers, seem as usual to have been 

 sharpened and improved by the struggle for existence ; 

 at any rate Miss Bird seems to prefer their women. 

 Miss Bird stops in the neighbourhood of a Cochin 

 Chinese village where river boats are more crowded than 

 at Canton. Among other low characteristics of the 

 "hideous" inhabitants she notes a wide separation of the 

 great toe from the rest. 



Vol. xxviii.— No. 720 



In the seas about Singapore there is "nothing scanty, 

 feeble, or pale," while on land she finds a perpetual 

 struggle between man and the jungle, and a power of 

 vegetation which must be a source of wealth to the former 

 when he has numbers and energy to control it. The 

 average temperature there is 80° F., with no greater 

 range in any part than 24 : moist and uniform. This 

 moisture adds greatly to the oppressiveness of the heat — 

 nowhere else did Miss Bird feel it so overpowering as in 

 a canoe on a river at night — but our traveller is one who 

 can feel mere living to be a luxury with the thermometer 

 at 88°, and her powers of endurance are shown by the 

 early collapse of one of the only two companions she 

 made in any part of her journey, although the daughter 

 of the Resident at Malacca. This town is now out of the 

 line of traffic, and Miss Bird describes in equal wealth of 

 words its monotonous silence and sleepiness, and the 

 impression and fascination it produced upon her. It is 

 only 2° north of the equator, and the journeyings which 

 commence from here are in small territories on the west 

 coast of the Malayan peninsula, only 3° further north. 



The jungle there is not an entanglement of profuse and 

 matted scrub but a noble forest of majestic trees, many of 

 them supported at their roots by three buttresses, behind 

 which thirty men could find shelter. On many of the top 

 branches of these other trees have taken root from seeds 

 deposited by birds, and have attained considerable size. 

 Under these giants stand the lesser trees grouped in 

 glorious confusion. A long list of such is given, all of 

 which are bound together by the rattan with its tough 

 strands from 100 to 1200 feet in length. An enthusiastic 

 description of magnificent tropical flowers follows here ; 

 but elsewhere she reconciles her description with the dif- 

 ferent one which Mr. Wallace gives by remarking that 

 " a traveller through a tropical jungle may see very few 

 flowers, and be inclined to disparage it. It is necessary 

 to go on adjacent rising ground and look down where 

 trees and trailers are exhibiting their gorgeousness," 

 " where indeed one has to look for most of the flowers.'' 

 The silence and colourlessness of the heart of the forest, 

 she tells us, and the colour, light, vivacity, and movement 

 among the tree tops contrast most curiously. Even with 

 the latter our masses of flowers, buttercups and daisies, 

 gorse or heather, are compared favourably among very 

 few things of home which are compared favourably with 

 what she finds abroad. 



Cf the mangrove she notes that the seeds germinate 

 while still attached to the branch — a long root pierces the 

 covering and grows rapidly downwards from the heavy 

 end of the fruit — which arrangement secures that when 

 the fruit falls off the root shall become at once embedded 

 in the mud ; of the cocoanut palm, that in loose sandy 

 soil near the salt water it needs neither manure nor care 

 of any kind, but if planted more than two hundred yards 

 from the sea it requires manure or human habitation, and 

 that its fruit takes fourteen months from the appearance 

 of the blossom till the ripe fruit falls ; of the nutmeg that 

 it grows like a nectarine on a tree forty or fifty feet high, 

 with shining foliage. A ripe one open revealed the 

 nutmeg, with its dark brown shell showing through its 

 crimson reticulated envelope of mace, the whole lying in 

 a bed of pure white, a beautiful object. 



" The sensitive plant with its tripartite leaves, green 



R 



