jFIVE days in naning. 
281 
disparaging comparison which I had made when in Ram- 
bau. After passing the village of Ganorig, the road descends 
to the side of the paddy valley on which Ganong lies, 
but speedily rises again over a jungly spur of the hill, 
which at first is strewed with a gravel of laterite or iron- 
masked micaceous clay, but soon shews only a light 
clay. 
When this has been passed a comparatively wide open 
tract is entered. The valley stretches up, bounded by 
brushwood, to a grassy slope on which a bungalow stands 
and towards which the roads leads over the flat. On the 
right a branch valley runs to the S S. E. and, as we advance, 
another is seen on the left with a W. N. W. direction. Half 
way to the bungalow and on the left side of the road, 
a low fabric with clay walls and grass roof marks the hot 
springs of Ganong, generally called Ayer Panas. Behind 
the bath, and stretching up to the road beyond it and into 
a dense thicket behind, lies a pool or swamp of hot water, 
covered with a thick, fat, pulpy substance of a reddish eolor 
externally, formed of scum and leaves more or less decom¬ 
posed and massed together. A few yards behind the bathing 
house, and on the margin of the pool, a well has been sunk 
and bricked round, Here the water continually rises as d 
runs into channels which convey it to the two bath rooms 
when required, or, when not, discharge it on one side. I 
stooped over the well and plunged my hand in, but the heat 
was so much greater than I had anticipated that I imme¬ 
diately drew it back. The sensation was not merely physical. 
For more than two years I had devoted most of my leisure 
hours to the investigation of the geology of the southern 
extremity of the Peninsula, and I had gradually accumu¬ 
lated a body of facts which confirmed the opinion, resulting 
from my earliest observations, that the firm basis of the land 
immediately before the period of repose which has lasted 
till now, had been partially melted down or reduced by in¬ 
ternal heat and the crust broken, bent, raised, and, where 
not reduced or completely transformed, been in very many 
places, partially calcined, iron-masked or otherwise altered. 
I had frequently, amongst the islands around Singapore, come 
upon low rocky cliffs which gave new and unexpected illus¬ 
trations of the truth of this theory. But still the fact of 
the land, now so stable, having thus, as it were, at one 
stage and that the last in its history, been upborne almost 
floating on a sea of molten rock, seemed to belong to a pe¬ 
riod entirely separated from the present, and of which all the 
