76 A NATURALIST' 8 WANDEBINGS 



of cases did not proceed further thau knobbed buds, the bulk 

 of which I found, by marking and carefully examining them 

 every day, produced fruit without expanding their petals, or, to 

 use the scientific term, cleistogamously. 



Marching in company with these disastrous seasons came 

 the terrible epidemic among the buifaloes (the natives' stay 

 in the cultivation of their fields, and the main part of their- 

 riches), which had not disappeared in the middle of 1883, 

 being less violent only from paucity of victims. The plague 

 was nearly coincident with the blight — fortunately net of a 

 very severe nature — of the Hemileia vastatrix in the coffee 

 gardens. It is a remarkable fact that the buffalo disease 

 and the Hemileia appeared without, as far as can be traced, 

 extraneous contagion, on the western coasts of Sumatra 

 (happily for that island in a slight degree only), and on the 

 extreme west of Java, whence it vaulted in most eccentric 

 riot throughout the whole island. Not only was the coffee 

 blighted, but the grass meadows and the forest trees also were 

 so covered, especially in places with a westerly exposure, with a 

 fungoid disease as to become a subject of native remark. One 

 could not help suspecting that these noxious germs had been 

 brought by the winds, and that perhaps even the plague in 

 the herds had resulted from the blighted grass on which they 

 fed. The correctness of this view seems to some slight degree 

 corroborated by the information I subsequently obtained from 

 natives and others in various parts of the Archipelago. In 

 Sumatra, not only the buffaloes suffered, but the elephants, the 

 deer and the wild pigs died in the forest in immense numbers, 

 and, by preying on the dying herds, even the tigers fell 

 victims to the stalking pestilence. In Timor also, in the 

 higher parts of the interior of the island, the cattle were 

 attacked, while in the southern plains the pigs and the horses, 

 which there run wild in herds, were found scattered about in 

 the forest dead. 



Closely following the bad years and the bovine pestilence, 

 which deprived them of the means of cultivating their lands, 

 came a scarcity bordering on famine and a fever epidemic of a 

 virulent kind, to which the natives succumbed in thousands. 

 The tale of the woes of their province must surely have 

 seemed to them full and running over when the volcanic wave 



