VOYAGE FROM INDIA TO SIAM AND MALACCA. 71 



tioned before there can be no doubt, because the body and eight 

 principal arms had hardly been covered. All the other stony 

 corals had lost their animals, and this circumstance showed me- 

 that the animals are most lively in this season. It would be 

 impossible to describe their different species and varieties in 

 colour, and as my researches concerning them are not of very 

 long standing, I postponed my description until I should have 

 time to make closer observations. 



In the evening I was fetched out one and a half mile, to the 

 ship of Captain Welsch, which had just arrived on the coas*^ of 

 Sumatra. His child was not well. Although I lost some time 

 in this way, the captain made up for it amply by presenting me 

 with the beak of a bird, which he had received in Sumatra on the 

 Padidir coast. Mr. Grew has described this beak before, but 

 very incompletely. It really belongs to the Buceros Rhinoceros. 

 It is not probable that this bird should live on carrion, because 

 the beak is much too weak, it is more likely that the people here 

 are right, and that he lives on fruit like the Buceros nasutus, 

 which also lives here frequently. The horn on the beak resem- 

 bles the shell of lobsters both in substance and colour. The 

 Chinese believe a stone of wonderful virtues is contained in the 

 beak of the Buceros and as they buy all the specimens they can 

 get, these bird are very dear here. 



18. — I went again to Pullu Jambo. I found a kind of 

 Amoimini] the blossoms were white and grew in bundles; the 

 fruits were covered with fibre. The leaves are very much like 

 those of the Amomum with the single large blossoms, but their 

 fruits grow close to the root. I described the Amomum. Near 

 the sea I found here many Alcyonia, which were of a pale fleshy 

 colour and had many cylindrical branches. Holothurians were 

 very frequently between the stones on the shore, and also the 

 shiny, many-limbed, transparent Holothurian, which has a red 

 stripe on either side along the back. The first kind I found 

 during the first days of my return in the island of Cockren, and 

 I have then already made the observation that if one tries to pick 

 them up, everything that they contain in their bodies runs down- 

 wards so that they swell out at the lower part and augment in 

 weight, and this causes them to break near the point where the 

 finger touches them. The shiny skin burns the fingers, like that 

 of so many other molluscs. As the weather was fine, I often had an 



