4G JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



in the Eed Sea. The coaling port, Aden, may not delight you, 

 but Ceylon or Penang will make you half frantic with delight, if 

 the real traveller's "bee is in your bonnet," and the same is true 

 of Singapore. It is an epoch in one's life to see and hear the 

 free swing and cool rustle of Palm leaves for the first time in the 

 open air, and even the Victorian Water Lily and the Sacred 

 Nelumbium are none the less luxuriant and lovely as here seen 

 in the open-air pools and canals. From Singapore you take a 

 branch line to Borneo, a distance of about 700 miles, and when 

 the steamer touches the wharf at Labuan you feel somewhat dis- 

 appointed, for the coast-line is flat, and most of the low hills in 

 sight have been denuded of their vegetation. 



But, at any rate, you soon find that you have reached a part 

 of the world where it is " always afternoon " ; you have for once 

 a climate with the heat and sunshine of eternal summer ; you 

 have come near the equator, where such things as frost and snow 

 and winter are absolutely unknown. The sea is like burnished 

 silver set with opals and pearls, and all around you lie, like 

 emerald islets, hundreds of oases basking in a warm and 

 shallow desert of sea. The main factors in tropical vegetation 

 are simply Palms, Bamboos, Musas, Plantains or Bananas, and 

 Tree Ferns, and these are the plants that really constitute the 

 charm of all tropical scenery. 



And when " at last," as Charles Kingsley has it, you land in 

 Borneo itself, the luxuriance of its vegetation actually paralyses 

 you, and you begin to doubt not only your own eyes, but your 

 " mind's eye " as well. So robust and ample are stems and 

 leaves, and so different the general aspect of many stove plants, 

 that you don't recognise them as old hothouse friends. 



Once and for ever you see how poor and puny all glass-house 

 batany must ever appear to those whose lives have been spent in 

 Nature's own great open-air conservatories. 



Now you realise what tropical islands really are. Warmed 

 by perpetual sunshine, deluged by copious rains, thrilled by 

 electricity, they are really vast conservatories of beautiful vegeta- 

 tion, and at the same time enormous zoological gardens inhabited 

 by gorgeous birds and rare and curious animals. Now and then, 

 however, you are suddenly pulled up and brought back home, as 

 it were. For example, you suddenly notice the great red man- 

 like monkey, the orang-outang or "wild man of the woods," 



