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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Now and then you see traces of Chinese ancestry amongst these 

 people, who are clean and healthy and outspoken, as most 

 mountain folk are elsewhere. Some of the young people are 

 really beautiful in form and feature — like pale bronze statues, 

 and the girls are especially winsome, but, alas ! early child- 

 bearing and hard field-work soon make withered, leather-skinned 

 hags of them. 



The language in general use, not only in Borneo but through- 

 out the archipelago, is called "Malay." It is really the "lingua 

 franca" used by residents in dealing with the natives, and every- 

 body must learn it in order to get along satisfactorily. Malay is 

 most expressive and easy to learn colloquially, and it is current 

 everywhere near the coast, but when you get inland every tribe 

 has a language or distinct dialect, and there Malay is of but 

 little use, and one must take interpreters as well as guides. 



But, as I said, nearly everybody learns the Malay tongue — 

 Dutch, English, German, Italian, Spanish, or Chinese, it is all the 

 same— the medium through which all business is done. 



The mountains, or the primeval forests near to rivers, are, as 

 a rule, the best collecting ground in Borneo, even if not also in 

 other parts of the tropical world. 



Most travellers talk a good deal about the "jungle," which 

 is quite a different thing to the primeval forests of which I have 

 spoken. A jungle is composed of the scrubby vegetation that 

 springs up after a forest has been destroyed — a tangled mass of 

 weedy growth of all kinds, and often a good cover for game, but 

 rarely good for a plant-collector. 



One of the sensations of a collector's life is entering into 

 the myterious stillness of a tropical forest for the first time. Tree 

 trunks rising all around you, and overhead a dense leafy roof 

 that excludes the sunshine. At your feet is a dense carpet of 

 Ferns and Aroids and Gingerworts, and other leafy things — all 

 of a singularly steel-blue shade of green that suggests moon- 

 light ; leafy things everywhere, but rarely anything in flower, 

 except when, as now and then happens, you come to a river 

 bank or to a clearing. 



As a fact, the flowers and insects and birds, the snakes even, 

 the tiger-cats and the monkeys — everything that loves sunlight and 

 air is a hundred to two hundred feet above your head ; and if you 

 want a near view of the epiphytal vegetation you must either get 



