76 



A NATUItALTST'S WANDMMimS 



of cases did not proceed further than knobbed bnds, the bulk 

 of which I found, by marking and.carofnlly examining them 

 every day, produced fruit without expanding their petals, or, to 

 use the scientific tenn, cleistogamously. 



Marching in company with these disastrous seasons came 

 the terrible epidemic among the buffaloes (the natives' stay 

 in the cultivation of their fields, and the main part of their 

 riches), which had not disappeared in the mi J die of 1883, 

 being less violent only from paucity of victims. The plague 

 was nearly coineident with the blight— fortunately not of a 

 very severe nature — of the Ilemileia vmfatrix in the coffee 

 gardens. It is a remarkable fact that the buffalo disease 

 and the Ilemileia aji^ieared without, as fur as can be ti-aeeJ, 

 extraneous contagion, on the western coasts of Sumatra 

 (happily for that island in a slight degree only), and on the 

 extreme west of Java, whence it vaulte<l in most eecentric 

 riot throughout the whole islantL Not only was the coffee 

 blighted, but the grass meadows and the forest trees also were 

 so covered, especially in places w ith a westerly exposure, with a 

 fungoid disease as to become a subject of native remark. One 

 could not help suspecting that these noxious germs had been 

 brought by the winds, and that perhaps even the plague in 

 the herds had resulted from the blighted grass on which they 

 fed. The correctness of this view seems to some slight degree 

 corroborated by the inibrmation I subsequently obtained from 

 natives and others in various parts of the Archipelago. In 

 Sumatra, not only the buffalnes suffered, but the elephants, the 

 deer and the uild pigs died iu the ibrest in immense niunbers, 

 and, by preying on the dying herds, even the tigers fell 

 victims to the stalking pestilence. In Timor also, in the 

 higher parts of the interior of the island, the eattle were 

 att^icked, while in the southern plains the pigs and the horses, 

 which there run wild in herds, were found scattered about in 

 the forest dead. 



Closely following the bad years and the bovine pestilence, 

 which deprived them of the means of cultivating their laiuls, 

 came a scarcity bordering on famine and a fever epidemic of a 

 virulent kind, to which the natives succumbed in thousands. 

 The tale of the woes of their province must surely have 

 seemed to them full and running over when the volamic wave 



