top of Mount Pangerango, that is to say, at heights ranging from 3,500 ft. to 10,000 ft. The garden at Tjibodas remains, and at the Governor-General's summer villa at Tjipanas one might imagine one's-self in a private garden in Surrey or Kent.

In the buildings at Buitenzorg, facilities are afforded for foreign students, and at the time of our visit a Japanese Professor, from the Tokio University, who had studied for three and a half years in Berlin, was making an exhaustive investigation on scientific lines. Everything that can be of service to students of botany is to be found here in the museum, herbarium and library.

The general herbarium has been arranged on the Kew model. Besides a large collection of plants made by Zollinger between 1845 and 1858, it contains the valuable collections gathered by Teysmann, between 1854 and 1870, throughout the Malay Archipelago. Specimens by Kurz and Scheffer are also found, together with other recent collections of plants from Borneo and adjacent islands. Duplicates from the Herbarium at Kew Gardens and from several of the more famous European herbaria are to be found here, as well as numerous specimens from the botanical institutions of the British Colonies.

The Herbarium Horti contains the necessary materials for the compilation of the new catalogue of the Botanic Gardens, and the Herbarium Bogoriense contains plants to be found in the neighbourhood of Buitenzorg.

Besides specimens of fruits, there is a comprehensive technical collection in the Botanical Museum—fibres, commercial specimens of rattan, india-rubber, and gutta-percha, barks for tanning purposes, Peruvian barks, vegetable oils, indigo samples, various kinds of meal, resins and damars. There is also a section devoted to forest and staple produce.

Fuller details of the gardens and environs of Buitenzorg may be found in the handbook published by Messrs. G. Kolff and Co., Batavia.

One need not be wholly a scientific investigator to appreciate the beauties of Buitenzorg. There is here one view which has been described over and over again, oftentimes in the language of hyperbole—the view of the Tjidani Valley from the verandah of Bellevue Hotel. It is, indeed, difficult to avoid the use of extravagant language in the attempt to describe this beauty spot of Nature.

Though he was writing of a beautiful woman, F. Marion Crawford might have been describing some beautiful landscape when he wrote in his own exquisite style:—

The noble Roman, prompted to exclaim "Behold the Tiber" as he stood on the summit of Kinnoull Hill and gazed upon the fertile valley of Scotland's noblest stream, saw no fairer sight than this veritable Garden of Eden in Equatorial Java.

Seen in the afternoon when the setting sun is casting long shadows over the landscape, the scene in the Tjidani Valley is calculated to arouse the artistic senses of the most insusceptible. Miles away, the Salak raises his majestic cone against the blue sky. In the distance, the mountain forms a purple background for the picture, purple flecked with soft white patches of floating cloud. Beneath his massive form, colour is lost in shadowy but closer at hand are the dark pervading greens of the trees and vegetation, palms and tree ferns and banana trees helping by their graceful form to provide the truely tropical features, while the equally graceful clumps of bamboo sway and creak in the light breeze, their pointed leaves supplying that perpetual flutter and movement which one associates with the birches and beeches of one's native land. The cultivated patches on hillside and valley are rich in colour. Here, the yellow paddy is ripening for the sickle; there, it is bright green; alongside, the patient buffaloes are dragging a clumsy wooden plough through water-covered soil to prepare for the next crop. The lake-like patches reflect weird outlines, and one almost imagines that they catch the brilliant colours from the sun-painted clouds.

Down the valley, crossing the picture from left to right is the river—the Tjidani,—a broad shallow stream when we saw it, in which men, women and children are constantly bathing. From the compact kampong nestling among the trees, the native women, clad in bright coloured sarongs, came with babies, who take to the water as if it were their natural element. Merry shouts of laughter ascend from the valley as the youngsters splash about and chase each other. Everything suggests beauty and peace and contentment, and as one drinks in the scene it is borne in upon one that the comparison with the Garden of Eden is not inapt. What could one wish for more than a beautiful, bounteous land and a happy, contented people!

On the Road to Sindanglaya

Long before sunrise, the sound of merry voices arose from the valley. Already the natives were bathing in the Tjidani, and, when the light came, the primeval life on which the sun had gone down was reproduced in the model-like scene spread out before us. Our kreta for the journey over the Poentjak Pass had been ordered for six o'clock, but with un-Oriental punctuality it was a quarter-past live when the sound of carriage wheels broke in upon our dreams.

While we sipped our morning coffee,—Java hotel coffee has improved since Miss Scidmore anathematised it in 1899,—the sun's rays began to peep over the shoulder of the Salak, and dispelled the morning mists on river and valley. The Salak's fretwork crater stood out entirely clear—his form a purple background to the picture gradually unfolding itself. Nature was everywhere awake. Children's voices in play blended with the songs of early workers proceeding to the fields. Butterflies flitted and floated like detached petals from the flowers. Distance converted human figures into larger butterflies, yellow and orange, pink and blue and red. If it were beautiful in the evening, the scene was enchanting in the morning, and it was with reluctance that we obeyed the summons to early breakfast, and followed our barang into the kreta to begin the journey to Sindanglaya.

It was half-past six o'clock when we were salaamed out of the courtyard of the Bellevue by the hotel "boys."

The kreta was not a handsome affair. In fact it was one of the most disreputable vehicles it has ever been our misfortune to travel in, and when we made acquaintance of the road it had to travel over we must give the owner credit for an abundant faith in the toughness of the kreta. It was a cross between the carromata of the Philippines and a covered dog-cart. There was no aid to mount. By a series of gymnastics we managed to get into the driver's seat—our own was behind his but also facing to the front. In attempting to get there, a sudden movement of the team sent us plunging into the barang, and, in extricating ourselves, head came in contact with the roof and hat went overboard.

Eventually we went off with a bound along the main street of Buitenzorg, scattering the fowls obtaining a precarious living in the roadway, and sending cats and dogs and goats flying for safety into the houses.