36 AN ACCOUNT OF A BOTANICAL EXPEDITION 



mass of limestone hill known as Bukit Lagi which was close 

 to the village. It was cutoff, however, hy a broad river which 

 had to be crossed by a boat near the market place. After cross- 

 ing we found ourselves in a pasture country, of rather long 

 grass, among which grew a beautiful pale bluish white gentian, 

 Exacum tetragomcm. This is an Indo-Chinese genus not 

 previously known from the Peninsula, for the species recorded 

 under "Lobb, Singapore" in the Materials were undoubtedly 

 wrongly localized, (Lobbs, collections from Khasiya, Penang 

 and Singapore being mixed in distribution). There were a 

 number of other attractive plants in this pasture, the water- 

 balsam with its large pink flowers (Hydrocera) and a beautiful 

 bright blue Cyanotis (C. axillaris) with succulent red stems, 

 said to be a pest in rice fields in India, but quite absent from 

 the fields of the south of the Peninsula. The little Hydrolea 

 with its azure blue starlike flowers was common. We pushed 

 through the wet grass to the foot of Bukit Lagi and collected 

 a number of plants at the base, but had soon to return as the 

 dusk was beginning to fall. 



By this time although we had brought a fair number of 

 wire presses for drying the plants, we began to run out of 

 them, as our collections had been very large. We therefore 

 had to look about for material to construct new ones. For- 

 merly I always used presses made of crossed laths of hard 

 wood, but these proved awkward sometimes to carry through 

 thick forest, and I substituted for them the ordinary wire presses 

 of crossed wire, which I contrived to have made sufficiently 

 strong and not too heavy, in fact hardly as heavy as the wooden 

 ones, and more easily portable. In the Telom and Temengo 

 expeditions we found plenty of bamboos which, split into suit- 

 able lengths and tied with string or bast from some jungle tree 

 or climber, niade suitable presses. At Kanga, bamboo was 

 scarce, the only ones were a few clumps of Bambusa spinosa 

 belonging to natives who mostly required the culms for their 

 own buildings and fences, so though we procured a few we had 

 to make shift with anything else we could get that could be 

 used and we found the most suitable things to be the dry leaf 



Jour. Straits Branch 



