114 A NATURALIST'S WANDERINGS 



which flourished elegant Melastomas, with white instead of 

 pink flowers, and raspberries (Bubus) of many kinds, the Bubus 

 Uneatus, a form with specially beautiful foliage,^ being abun- 

 dant between 6000 and 7000 feet. On many of these moun- 

 tains a single step would often lead the foot out of the green 

 forest on to the edge of a great scar-like blotch, exuding 

 sulphureous vapours through every crack and orifice, dis- 

 figuring their verdant slopes, like a suppurating sore on a 

 fair neck. Yet within the indurated margins of these smoul- 

 dering craters, a flora specially and surprisingly interesting is 

 to be encountered. Amid the very vapours of the fumaroles I 

 gathered bunches of Ericaceous flowers, such as Gauliheria 

 leucocarpa and punctata, and Vaccinium florihundum, their 

 leaves loaded with sulphur and other deposits, but their 

 flowers stiff with healthy waxiness and fragrant with their 

 own sweet honey odour ; Dipteris Jiorsfieldi and other ferns 

 and plants, nowhere else to be seen on the mountain, grew in 

 the steaming mud ; while Bhododendron retusam stretched its 

 roots out into the fuming streams, which boiled and bubbled 

 over out of the rumbling cauldrons below. 



The Dipteris fern is not found in Java much farther to the 

 east. A line through the longitude of Samarang, which ap- 

 pears to be its eastern boundary, is also the western limit of 

 the teak (Tectona graniis), of the camphor tree (Drijobalanops 

 camphoraj, and of several species of palms (Borassus JlabelUfor- 

 mis), and several species of Caryota and other trees, which are 

 not found in West Java, though abundant in Sumatra. Mr. 

 Wallace has pointed out how much he found the Ornithology 

 of the eastern to differ from that of the western portion of 

 the island; and among mammalia, I am told by intelligent 

 natives, neither the rhinoceros nor the Badger-headed Mydaus 

 crosses this boundary eastward. 



Outside the rim of the craters, where the ground had begun 

 as it were to heal, broad patches of a beautiful species of lichen 

 (Cladonia vulcanica) covered the surface, each tip of its pale 

 grey thallus crowned with a fructifying scarlet disk. This 

 is the lowly vegetation with which Nature, when a crater has 

 become extinct, first slowly hides the wounds her strife has 

 made, while scars made by landslips are concealed in a single 

 season with a luxuriant covering of bananas. 



