As we pulled away from this place and looked back, even the want of light and shade 

 and the heavy rain that was falling did not prevent our acknowledging that it possessed a 

 character of picturesque beauty of a very pleasing and uncommon kind. It, in truth, 

 united the luxuriance and gracefulness of tropical vegetation with the open and irregular 

 aspect of a wood on some river's bank, half rocky, in England. The jungle trees of Singa- 

 pore do not in general attain sufficiënt size to assume that air of grandeur which distin- 

 guishes those on the Pinang mountains, and they are so blended with the undcrwood, which 

 grows up like a thick erop of rank weeds bet ween them , and so inlerwoven by creeping 

 and pendent plants into a dense mass of green, that their individuality is extinguished. 

 The display of botanie life is wonderful in its measureless, all pervading exuberance, and 

 this very profusion ministers to a deeper sense of the silent, soft, spirit-like, but most po- 

 tent and most motley, power of vegetation. Still no tree or humbler plant invites us to 

 dweil delightedly on its own perfection. At this spot, however, many stately trees rosé up 

 in self dependent strength and beauty, and expanded in mid air into their complele propor- 

 tions, or, if they sought companionship, they did not woo a promiscuous throng, but each 

 embraced a single partner. The number of doublé or married trees congregated at this 

 particular spot was indeed remarkable, and, — recollecting that the Hindoos either select 

 the neighbourhood of such trees as the sites of temples or plant them where they do not 

 grow naturally, and that, in those ages when they flourished over the Indian Archipelago, 

 the strait between Pulo Uhin and Pulo Tikang was the portal of one of their earliest and 

 most renowned colonies, Zaba on the Johore river, — it was again dimcult to avoid sur- 

 rendering the mind to a belief that the grey pillared and fluted piles, that assumed more 

 and more an artificial appearance as each stroke of the oar reduced their size, were really the 

 remains of some great fane overborne hy many centuries of desolation (1). 



It will be borne in mind that the above are first impressions, and that, having been 

 conducted to one particular locality to see the furrowed rocks, 1 believed they were confined 

 to it. My next visit undeceived me, and proved that I had been nearer the truth when 

 looking for tokens of an internat structural arrangement in the granite, than when conjec- 

 turing the former existence of a cascade; a conjecture which a wider exploration of the same 

 Point would have shewn to be baseless. 



I now proceed to notice the rocks at the different places which I have visited, beginning 

 with the Eastern portion of the southern coast after passing the Quarries, going f hen to 

 the western division of the Island, and finally returning to the Point where my desire to 

 examine the Island was first awakened. 



The seaward extremity of the lateral hill or ridge to the East of the Chinese Quarries is 

 environed by mangroves. 



The succeeding point advances out of the mangrove fringe. At the W. side a large mass 

 of solid granitic rock of a greyish colour, varied by light brownish red (and consisting of 

 grey felspar and transparent quartz with some black mica interspersed) stretches transverse- 



(1) The Extract from my Journal included ia the paper alluded to _at p. 3 stops here. 



