100 
FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
Our next trip was to Borneo. The most 
important thing there was the wild man, 
and the head-hunter. You can scarcely 
believe that Borneo, the second largest 
island in the world, with a population 
running into the millions, and which has 
been in contact with civilization for hun ¬ 
dreds of years, has so many people still 
in a savage state. A few of these wild 
people and head-hunters were brought in 
under a Britsh guard for us to see what 
they were like. Those fellows do not 
take scalps like our Indians; they cut off 
the whole head, and the one who has the 
most heads stuck on poles in his front 
yard is the most prominent citizen. 
It is a most wonderfully rich country, 
from a horticultural standpoint. I vis¬ 
ited the market at Labuan. I don’t know 
whether any of you were ever in the Key 
West market as conducted some years 
since. It reminded me very much of that. 
The same kinds of vegetables, the same 
kind of fish, the same of fruits—everv- 
thing about the same. The coast also 
looks very much like the western coast of 
South Florida from Marco down; man¬ 
grove thickets, etc. It gets quite moun¬ 
tainous out in the interior, however. 
From Labuan our next run was across 
and south of the equator, some four hun¬ 
dred miles, to Batavia, in Java. There 
we came in touch with a new civilization 
to us—the Dutch. The Dutch are in 
charge, and they do things. They have 
made out of the Island of Java a perfect 
paradise. They used to raise much good 
coffee there, but unfortunately some kind 
.of blight has attacked the shrub and they 
do not produce nearly so much of it now. 
It would be a fine thing for some of you 
scientific gentlemen to go over there and 
find what will help them out. However, 
I don’t think we can spare any of you 
yet awhile. 
The most remarkable fruit we saw in 
Java was the mangosteen. The mango- 
steen is in size about like a tangerine, and 
similar in shape, a little bit flattened in 
the stem and blossom diameter, with a 
shell or covering loose like the tangerine, 
but instead of being yellow, it is the color 
of an egg plant. This outer covering is 
brittle like a walnut shell. After taking 
off the shell or covering, there is revealed 
as in the leitchee, a delicious pearly-white 
fruit with several segments, and I think 
if your eyes were closed you could at first 
hardly tell the difference of taste between 
the mangosteen and the leitchee. It can¬ 
not be transported or shipped any dis¬ 
tance. They manage to bring it in from 
the interior to the cities, but have never 
succeeded in getting any to Europe. We 
were told there is a standing offer of ten 
thousand guilders to anyone who would 
take a box of mangosteens to Queen Wil- 
helmina in Holland, but no one has ever 
been able to earn it. 
They also have another fruit here, 
known as the longan, and I am told it is 
on this stock that Mr. Fairchild hopes to 
bud the leitchee. Two other fruits that 
are fine are the doekoe and the rambotan, 
the latter of which, like the longan, belong 
to the same family as the leitchee. 
While I am speaking on the subject of 
fruits in Java, I am reminded that the 
orange in this and all those tropical coun¬ 
tries, ripens and becomes sweet and dries 
up unless picked, as our oranges do here ; 
but it never turns yellow. It may have a 
tinge of yellow, about as the peach has a 
tinge of red. It seemed strange to have 
