BY J. C. MOULTON. 
141 
bottle of excellent Madeira to Her Majesty’s health and 
that of my far-distant friends, and deposited the bottle 
upside down with a paper in it in a conspicuous place, to 
read off the barometer and hastily begin my descent. . . . 
One of my men, despising the caution with which I avoided 
all the little runs of water and selected the best drained 
places, attempted to make a short cut by following the 
course of one of these. His life had well-nigh paid the 
penalty of his rashness. His feet slipped from under him 
and away he went at railway speed down the inclined 
plain ; fortunately for him, he was wearing a long Sooloo 
kris in his girdle in a wooden sheath; this dragging along 
the rocks was caught in a crevice and saved its owner from 
destruction. He had slid about thirty yards ; thirty more 
had shot him over a precipice. The roughness of the rock 
had made sad havoc of his flesh, but he fortunately escaped 
serious injury.” 
Low descended on March 12th to the paddi farms, “ to 
the almost total deprivation of the use of my knee for a 
month afterwards.” 
As to altitudes, he made Pakka camp 8368 ft., the 
summit 8615 ft. Of this last record he writes : “ But it is 
not trustworthy, as the mercury, which for ten minutes 
remained stationary at the same height as at the lower 
station, was still rapidly falling.” The highest point 
reached he made “ eleven or twelve hundred feet higher 
than the cave, or about 9500 ft. ; ” and then noted : “ this, 
I think, is an underestimate, as the first part of the ascent 
was very steep, and the whole of it sufficiently so to be 
exceedingly fatiguing, and four and a half hours were 
occupied in overcoming it.” He continues: “From what 
I saw, I feel certain the highest summit, wherever it is, 
which has been made by triangulation between 13,000 ft. 
and 14,000 ft., is inaccessible to any but winged animals. I 
conceived that I had reached the true summit of the 
mountain, and certainly no point within sight was more 
than 500 ft. or 600 ft. above me. I imagine that the 
measurement by triangulation considerably exceeds the 
true height.” 
A small collection of plants was obtained, and the more 
remarkable new species were described by Sir Joseph 
Hooker in leones Plantarum , vol. ix. (1852). 
Sir Hugh Low came out to Sarawak in 1845 as a 
naturalist. In 1848 he became Colonial Secretary of 
Labuan, where he remained till 1877, when he was 
