IN THE COCOS-EEELING ISLANDS. 9 



I received most favourable letters of commendation to all in 

 authority under his jurisdiction, and parted with the expres- 

 sion of his warm interest and best wishes. 



Buitenzorg is one of the chief holiday and health resorts of 

 sick Batavians, and possesses not only a magnificent climate, 

 but scenery of great beauty and picturesqueness. It is 

 overlooked by two large and at present harmless volcanic 

 mountains, the Salak with its disrupted cone, into whose very 

 heart one looks by the terrible cleft in its side, and the double- 

 peaked Pangerango and Gede, from whose crater is ever 

 lazily curling up white vapoury smoke from the simmering 

 water which at present fills the summit of its pipe. Besides 

 the fine views to be had in its neighbourhood, Buitenzorg is 

 chiefly remarkable for its botanic garden, perhaps the finest 

 in the world, which surrounds the Governor's palace, and in 

 which many weeks might be profitably and delightfully spent 

 by the botanist. 



To Mr. Teysmann, who died but recently, after some sixty 

 years of unbroken service in it, the garden is largely in- 

 debted for the actual ingathering of the bidk of its treasures. 

 For fifty years he was engaged in collecting through the 

 islands of the Archipelago ; and some of the rarest and finest 

 specimens in it, brought as seeds by him, he had the satisfaction 

 of seeing develop into the grandest of its trees. 



A long wide avenue of Kanarie {Canarium commune) trees 

 traverses the centre of the garden, which interlacing high 

 overhead in a superb leafy canopy, affords at all hours of the 

 day a delightful promenade. Near the principal entrance a 

 tall Amhersiia noUlis forms in the rainy season, when it is 

 ablaze with immense scarlet fiower-trosses and plumes of young 

 leaves of the richest brown, a remarkable object of beauty. On 

 the right the garden descends to its boundary stream through 

 arboreta of Buteas, Cassias, Calliandras, Tamarinds, and Poin- 

 cianas, to groves of Bromeleads and tall Oadaceas, Pandans, 

 Nipas, Cycads and climbing Screw-pines; to plots of Ama- 

 ryllideie, Iris and water-loving plants ; and beneath the richest 

 palmetum in the world, its glory perhaps the Oyrtostacliys 

 rendu, whose long bright scarlet leaf sheaths and flower- 

 spathes, and its red fruit and deep yellow inflorescence hanging 

 side by side, at once arrest the eye. 



