7 
Ridley .— The Distribution of Plants. 
indigenous flora is destroyed. Big areas which in 1888 were covered with 
a trackless dense forest, such as the country lying along the railway between 
Klang and. Kwala Lumpur, are now entirely covered with Para rubber 
trees for many miles, and nothing at all is left of the indigenous flora, which 
has completely vanished, never to return. Already many local species 
collected by myself in 1899 to 1900 in such areas are now apparently quite 
extinct. 
Where countries are thinly populated, as in the interior of the Malay 
Peninsula, tenanted only by the scattered wild tribes known as the Sakai, 
very little alteration in the flora is made by the people ; they may fell the 
jungle round their huts, but they do not occupy one spot long ; a death in the 
family or the shortage of game sooner or later causes them to leave, and 
the surrounding forest soon closes over these clearings again. 
But where a village springs up and permanent cultivation is made, the 
indigenous flora soon vanishes. Sometimes plants of special economic value, 
such as rattans, rubber, gutta-percha, or wood-oil trees, are so extensively 
sought that they become rare, if not extinct. 
I have visited an old Malay settlement on the Pahang river where 
I could only find one species of rattan, a valueless Daemonorops. As the 
rattan stems are cut before fruiting, the other species, valued for tying in 
house-building and for export, had been exterminated by not being allowed 
to fruit. Again, the wood-oil trees, Dipterocarpus grandiflora , Blanco, in 
all accessible parts round Malacca, were nearly exterminated (until more or 
less protected by Government), in the process, of extracting the oil, by 
making large holes in the trees ; and near Kuching, in Borneo, one could 
see hundreds of trees of Dyera Lowii , Hook, fil., standing dead from having 
been tapped to death for the Jelutong rubber. While in cases of complete 
destruction of the flora the trees, lianes, jungle herbs, and epiphytes 
disappear, there comes an invasion of open-country herbs and bushes, partly 
from surrounding areas, should there be any open country, heaths, or sandy 
plains to supply them, and partly plants introduced accidentally and occa¬ 
sionally intentionally by man. Curiously, plants introduced intentionally 
for use or ornament comparatively seldom establish themselves as part of 
the new flora—that is to say, reproduce themselves naturally and spread so 
as to form an all-important feature ; but in the East Indies we may cite, as 
ornamental plants introduced and run wild, such examples as Oxatis rosea , 
Jacq., Lantana mixta , Linn., Mimosa pudica , Linn., Lochnera rosea , Rchb. 
fil., two species of Titrnera , Anacardium occidental , Linn., and the aquatics 
Eichornia speciosa, Kth., and Limnocharis emarginata , H.B.K., and in 
Africa Opuntias and Argemone mexicana , Linn. All these are tropical 
American plants mostly introduced originally for ornament, and now form¬ 
ing a conspicuous part of the flora. The larger number of weeds, however, 
are inconspicuous herbs: Grasses, Compositae, herbaceous Rubiaceae, 
