BOTANICAL EXPLOEATION IN BORNEO. 



53 



a native to climb up and fling them down, or you must cut down 

 some of the most likely trees. 



The duty of an explorer is to find things ; he must be a real 

 discoverer. Then when he knows where a good plant grows in 

 quantity he can generally set native labour to do the mere col- 

 lecting part of the business. Then comes the art of preparing 

 the plants for the journey home. They may in the case of 

 Orchids at rest — that is collected during the dry monsoon — be 

 dried a little, and then packed in ventilated boxes ready for 

 shipment. 



Bulbs, tubers, stems, and roots, and many seeds, travel best 

 in close cases or boxes of earth, moist it may be, but neither wet 

 nor dry. 



Leafy plants and tender herbaceous plants, Ferns, and Orchids 

 not having pseudo-bulbs, such as Anaectochili and Cypripedium, 

 must be carefully established in glass-roofed Wardian cases. 



Phalsenopsids especially do not carry well unless established 

 for a year or so, i.e. well rooted on sections of Palm stems, or 

 arranged in bamboos with cocoa-nut fibre, after which the plant- 

 covered sticks are arranged in tall glass-roofed cases, so as to be 

 -carefully watched and watered, or aerated, on the voyage home. 



Some seeds never germinate if once they get thoroughly dry, 

 and the seeds of Nepenthes Rajah that germinated best at 

 Chelsea were collected and carried home in damp sphagnum moss 

 in a tightly corked and sealed glass jar. 



As a broad rule, lowland, plain, or shore plants carry best, i.e. 

 •endure more hardships, and also grow much more freely in our 

 hothouses at home, than do the plants from constantly cool and 

 moist mountains in the tropics, like Kina Balu. The lowland 

 plants have for centuries been accustomed, or educated let us 

 say, to vicissitudes, to changes from floods or drought, calm or 

 storm, while the mountain plants have never been subjected to 

 -extremes of heat or moisture. This is a fact that all collectors 

 are well aware of, namely, that mountain plants grown for ages 

 •cool and moist all the year round will not withstand the 

 vicissitudes and climatic extremes of the plain through which 

 i/hey must pass to the coast, and, even if they do this, the ordeal 

 •of passing through the Ked Sea is too much for them. 



This is true East and West alike. The pseudo-bulbous 

 Orchids like Odontoglossum crispum carry fairly well, but not 



