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 with beings too seldom recognized as members of the human family. Towards the sick, the poor, the sad, the suffering in any shape, her hand is unhesitatingly stretched out. They need no credentials save the stamp of sadness, sickness, poverty, and prompt aid is true aid. She seems endowed with God's special license to console, to translate mysterious sorrows into promised joys, to strengthen the weak, to soften the hard, to reconcile the rebellious.

The history of any one day of her life would fill chapters with scenes of anguish, of passion, of hope, of happy consummations, that might adorn the pages of a romance.

Thus, Miriam, "the old maid," is not less happy, less useful, less beloved than the wife and mother whose heart and hands are full of alternate cares and blessings. Those upon whose path of life the smile of Miriam Pleasance shines, never after speak scornfully of an "old maid." We entertain but one fear for Miriam; it is that she will not always bear the vestal title around which she has woven such an indescribable charm.

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 to their "mammies" in preference to her, and Ruth's words would sound in her ears again.

Those words had been a new revelation to Angelica; they had placed in her hands the golden key which unlocked the secret of her lassitude, and languor, and depression.

For some time after she became cognizant of her own state, the evil seemed aggravated by being comprehended; but the dangerous illness of her little son wakened the mother in her heart, and gave her a motive for exertion. She hung over his bed day after day, and forgot her ennui, her ailments, her low spirits, in ministering to the little sufferer. Then followed a thrill of joy, amounting to ecstasy, when the sweet invalid's first signs of returning health gladdened her maternal eyes.

"Ruth was right, again. Sorrow was good for me. I was suffering from a plethora of happiness," she inwardly exclaimed.

That conviction and that confession were the heralds of a happy change. It was not effected in an hour or in a day; it was hardly perceptible at first, but was gradually felt throughout the household, by children, servants, friends, dependants,—most of all, by Angelica's husband.

Ah! no one divined how simple was the magic that wrought this wonderful metamorphosis! A few passing words of truth, dropped from the kindly lips of a friend, and the discovery of an ailment which proved to be only "a plethora of happiness."

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 crown of age' should be deemed more beautiful than 'the golden circlet of youth.' True, Vanity cries out against gray hair, but that is simply because she is ignorant. Nature (from whom art learnt all her beautifying secrets) sent the snowy frame to soften faces which have been despoiled of their fresh coloring, and to render their losses less apparent. We have heard Landor's groan over 'growing old,' but if I mistake not, there is a more consolatory voice breathing from some healthier pages at hand."

She approached a small hanging library, filled with choice volumes, her favorite text books, selected Hillard's "Italy," and, after a rapid turning over of leaves, redolent with the fragrant memories of that "land of the sun," read aloud "growing old seems to depend much upon the temperament, and somewhat upon the will. With an active mind and warm heart all that is dark and unlovely in age may be kept off very long, if not to the end."

"To the end—ay—to the end—so shall it be!" responded Millicent, replacing the volume, while an expression of serene satisfaction played over her fine features, a look which strongly contrasted with the troubled shadow that obscured their beauty when that wail of Landor's set her musing.

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 speak to me. Dear Hubert, I have longed more than any one else to see you.

Rosa.—She's talked of you often enough—oftener, a great deal, than any one else—I can tell you that. Oh! I'm so glad! I'll burn that drawing-desk to-morrow morning. Rachel's busy fingers shall have a holiday—that they shall! I'll hide all the brushes and paints for a year.

Rachel.—But you must not forget that the hap- piness of this hour has been won by toil.

(Answer to charade—Industry.)

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 O! true sister of charity, bound by unerring impulses, stronger than all vows, would that thy welcome feet might find their way into the homes of all whom we love; that thy serene countenance might leave its image in the mind of all who need to learn how much strength can be allied to tranquillity!

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 her little arms to twine them round her neck, and Clara and Lily rejoiced over the coming of baby Anna. Indeed there was more joy amongst all the children at her arrival than they had felt before, for she had passed through that golden gate so young she had fewer earthly stains about her.

Let us crown her with flowers!' said one. 'Let her play with our white lamb!' said another. 'Let us take her to sail in the lily-boats!' cried another. 'Let us ask our dear guardian to sing to her!' Little Anna was tenderly laid on the lap of the guardian angel, and the hearts of the three sisters overflowed with perfect joy.

"That angel was once on this earth, a heavenly, minded girl. She had loved young children very dearly, and, when she died, her occupation in heaven was to instruct and watch over the children and infants who came from earth to that paradisiacal garden. If the mother, who mourned so deeply over her three lost treasures, could but have seen them there, would she not have exclaimed—

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Rh at the brook were much busier with their tongues than with their bleaching-sticks; and so it got worse and worse.

The two muzhiks began to talk ill of one another, and then they went to law; and if they found anything lying about they filched it. And so the women and children were taught to do the same. And life amongst them grew worse and worse. Ivan Shcherbakov summoned Gabriel Khromoi before the general assembly of peasants, and in the district court, and in the land court of Mir: so that they worried all the courts. And now Ivan had Gabriel punished or put in prison: and now Gabriel, Ivan. And the more they blackguarded each other, the more evil-disposed did they grow. They were fighting like dogs: the more they worried each other the more furious they grew. Strike one such dog from behind, and he'll fancy the other is biting him, and will hang on more savagely than ever. So, too, these muzhiks. They went to law and got each other fined or locked up, and the end of it all was that their hearts were hotter against each other than before.

"You just wait a bit, that's all, and I'll pay you out for this."

And so it went on amongst them for six years. Only the old man on the stove kept on saying the selfsame thing, and began to entreat with them.

"What do ye, children? Away with all your charges and counter-charges. Neglect not your work, and don't take offence at people, and it will be better for you. But the more you are wrath with them the worse it will be!" 145


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"And how does Jenny like the story?" I asked.

Jenny looked up with thoughtful eyes. "But do you believe that little Clara and Lily and Anna went to a garden like that, when they died, and were taught by an angel, and were so very happy?"

"I do believe so!"

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Tales from Tolstoi They listened not to the old man. It fell in the seventh year after this, that Ivan's daughter-in-law at a marriage feast rounded upon Gabriel in the presence of many people, and said he had gone off with other people's horses. Gabriel was drunk, he did not control his feelings; he struck the woman, and injured her so that she was in bed for a week. … Ivan was glad. He went and laid a complaint with the magistrate. "Now," thought he, "I shall be quit of my neighbour. He cannot avoid Siberia now."

And again Ivan's affair did not go as far as he wished it. The magistrate would not listen to his complaint. They came to see the woman; the woman got up, and there were no marks upon her. Ivan went to the local mir-court, and the mir-court transferred the matter to the district court. Ivan laboured hard at the district court, and plied the bailiff and clerk with half a bucket of sweet drink, and managed at last to get Gabriel condemned to a flogging on the back. They read the sentence to Gabriel in court.

The clerk read: "It is the sentence of the court that Gorde's serf Gabriel be punished by twenty strokes with the birch in the presence of the district court."

Ivan also heard the judgment and looked at Gabriel—what will he do next? On hearing it Gabriel went as white as a sheet, turned round and went out into the forecourt. Ivan went out after him: he was going to his horses, when he heard something—Gabriel was speaking.

"Good!" he was saying, "he will get my back warmed for me! It will sting me no doubt; let him 146


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 Ellen's devotion to her friend strengthened even until the hour of her death, which took place some years later. They corresponded faithfully, and in her letters Ellen poured out her full heart. After the lapse of a few years, they met once more. The storms had blown over the head of one, time had soothed some of her sorrows, success had rewarded her exertions, many a wound had healed, and many a broken link of friendship had been re-united; but the unmitigated gloom that surrounded Ellen was impreviousimpervious [sic] to a single ray of joy. She grew feebler and feebler, her sufferings and her disfigurement increased, until the one joyful hour when her Master bade her fling off the poor, mangled, earthly garment of her soul and stand before his presence, robed in the eternal loveliness of her pain-purified spirit.

Her memory was greenly preserved in the heart of her friend, the thought of Ellen blunted the sting of many an arrow, lifted the weight from many a burden, and taught her, with each new trouble, to reflect, "It might be worse!"

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Rh beware lest I make something warm him yet more!"

On hearing these words Ivan immediately returned to the court.

"Ye just judges! He has begun to threaten me! Listen, he has spoken before witnesses!"

Gabriel was sent for.

"Is it true that you said something?"

"I said nothing. Flay me, since you have the power! It is plain that I have to suffer, though in the right; and he may do anything he likes."

Gabriel would have said something more, but his lips began to tremble, and his cheeks. And he turned him round to the wall. Even the judges were shocked when they looked at Gabriel.

"How now," thought they, "if he were straightway to do some great mischief to his neighbour or to himself?"

And the oldest of the judges said: "Come now, my friends, 'twill be better than good if ye make it up. Now, friend Gabriel, canst thou say thou didst well in striking that woman? Good then! God will forgive thee whatsoever be thy sin! 'Tis good so, isn't it? Thou dost confess thy fault and beg his pardon, and he'll forgive thee. We will reverse our former judgment."

The clerk heard this and said: "That is impossible, because, according to article 117 of the Code, the preliminary reconciliation has not yet been shown to have taken place, so the sentence of the court alone remains valid, and that sentence ought to be enforced" 147


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 Though Mr. Stillwell is approaching the meridian of his days, as we have said, he is yet a bachelor. Probably his horror of the dread "no," has prevented his running the risk of hearing it from lips which smiled on him. If some pitying maid or widow, should ever chance to avail herself of the privilege of leap-year, Mr. Stillwell's settled aversion to the negative may eventually secure him a partner, who, for the rest of his life, will answer "no" for him, and thus defend him against his tormentors, and lead him to the turn in that long, briery lane, through which he is so sadly journeying. That is the one hope left for him. Would he be the first man who had found his salvation through a woman?

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 by nameless and unknown. The countenance was surely that of an angel. Through Joan's brief life, that face alone had helped her to conceive what angel faces might be.

Falling peacefully asleep, Joan departed—it might be to behold that lovely and familiar visage nearer still. She had accomplished her destiny and finished her work. She had written no books that would send her name down to posterity, had sung no songs which future ages would sing, had achieved nothing glorious in the realms of art, had made no marvellous discoveries, had earned no fame; but she had set a great example, which might profit others as much as literature, or artistic creations, or the wonders of science, or the deeds of the famous.

Had she not answered Rogers' definition of true greatness? Had she not done what deserves to be written? If she could have written, would it not have been what deserves to be read? Had she not made others better and happier for her life, in spite of its narrow sphere? And therefore was not the obscure child of toil one of the Great?

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Tales from Tolstoi But the judge did not listen to the clerk: "You have an itching tongue," said he. "The first and only code, brother, is, be mindful of God! and God bids us be peacemakers."

And again the judge tried to persuade the muzhiks, and he could not persuade them.

Gabriel would not listen to him.

"Here am I fifty years old," said he; "I've a son married, and from my youth up I've never been flogged; and now this botcher Van'ka brings me beneath the birch, and I am to salute him! Well, all I can say is, Van'ka shall have cause to remember this!"

Again Gabriel's voice trembled. He could say no more. He turned him round and went out.

From the court-house to the farm was ten versts, and Ivan returned home late. The women had already gone out to meet the cattle. He took out the horse, tidied things up, and went into the izba. There was no one in the izba, the children had not yet returned from the fields, and the women were with the cattle. Ivan went in, sat down on a bench, and fell a-thinking. He called to mind how Gabriel had received the sentence, and how he had grown pale and turned towards the wall. And his heart began to prick him. He imagined how it would have been with him if he had been sentenced to a whipping. He felt sorry for Gabriel. And he heard the old man on the stove begin to cough, turn him about, put out his feet, and come down from the stove. On getting 148


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30 Wood contains (1) water, (2) ligno-cellulose, (3) extractives, (4) ash or mineral matter. The water, in thoroughly-seasoned and air-dried wood, generally constitutes about one-eighth part of its weight. The main constituent of wood is the so-called ligno-cellulose, which is present to the extent of from 75 to 85 per cent. It may be resolved into two substances, which, for convenience' sake, are here called cellulose and lignose. The extractives belong to two groups — one, soluble in alcohol and ether, consists chiefly of resins ; the other, soluble in cold or hot water, or else in very dilute alkalies, includes tannin, albuminoids, gum, and colouring-matters. The following analyses of three kinds of wood in an air-dried state will convey a fair idea of their constitution in 100 parts:

The preparation of panels for painting requires much time and trouble. The directions given by ancient authorities are numerous, and not always accordant. One author tells us to boil the wood ; another says we are to coat it with mastic dissolved in twice-distilled turpentine and mixed with white. Then it is to be treated twice or thrice with spirits of wine, in which some white arsenic or corrosive sublimate has been dissolved ; coats of boiled oil, of liquid-varnish and white, and of verdigris and yellow are subsequently mentioned. Probably the best method of treating the harder woods intended for pictures is, after


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342

What is usually known under this name was for many years imported from the Baltic seaports of Dantzic, Riga, and Libau, and was the produce of forests 'in the interior of the Russian Baltic Provinces, and of Russian Poland, from whence it was brought to the coast by water, until railways were made. According to Laslett, the Riga timber, though of moderate dimensions, had the medullary rays more numerous and better marked than the Dantzic oak, and came to market in the form of hewn billets of about 18 feet.

But as the supplies of this oak became less, and the demand greater, a fresh source of supply was found in Slavonia and South Hungary, which for many years has furnished about half the total import through the ports of Trieste and Fiume. Mr. A. Howard tells me that the size and quality of this was better than the Baltic oak, but owing to the Austrian Government having recently diminished their cuttings in consequence of the rapid diminution of mature timber, a large quantity of billets are now exported from Odessa, which are believed to come from the forests of Podolia and Volhynia, and other provinces of South-West Russia.

All this imported oak is milder and more easily worked than English oak, and as only selected logs free from knots are shipped, it can be converted into boards with less waste and risk than home-grown timber. We have no certain evidence as to the existence of a sufficient quantity in Russia to keep up the supply either from the Baltic or Odessa, and though the more scientific foresters of Austria are taking steps to restore their oak forests by natural regeneration, it is probable that the French, who consume an immense quantity of oak from this region, will take all they can get, and this, coupled with the approaching disappearance of American oak large enough for quartering, must, sooner or later, cause our own timber when long and clean to be much more valuable than it is at present.

A note in Holinshed's Chronicles, vol. i. p. 357 (ed. 1807), seems to show that wainscot oak was already exported from the Baltic as long ago as Queen Elizabeth's reign, but whether "Danske" means that it came in Danish ships or from the port of Dantzig I cannot ascertain, though Colonel Brookfield, H.B.M. Consul at that port, has made inquiry on the subject.

Laslett is the only practical English writer I know of who was personally acquainted with the oak in its native forests in the east of Europe, having been employed by the Admiralty to survey the forests near Brussa, in Asia Minor, as well as in Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Styria, and Hungary. He states that in the


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Rh thorough seasoning, first of all to reduce the panel, by planing and glass-papering both sides equally, to the desired thickness. The panel is then soaked in water heated to 50° C, and then steamed. When dry, it receives a wash on both sides of a solution of corrosive sublimate in methylated spirit; it is again dried and seasoned in a warm air-chamber. After these operations, the panel should not require more than a slight rubbing with fine glass-paper, in order to render both surfaces plane. For panels to be used for oil-pictures, a priming is now applied, consisting of white lead, a little copal-varnish, and drying linseed-oil prepared by means of borate or oxalate of manganese. Allow this coat, which is intended to fill up the cavities and pores of the wood, to dry thoroughly, and then apply another coat in the transverse direction; subsequent coats should contain nothing but white lead (or other pigment) and the drying oil. Repeated smoothings of each coat, when hard, with fine pumice-powder are necessary; the last coat may consist of zinc-white and drying-oil. Both sides of the panel should be treated, as far as possible, alike, so that they may be equally loaded, and equally protected; but the pumice-rubbings are, of course, not required for the back of the panel. The object of priming the back is twofold—the prevention of decay and of the attacks of insects; and the avoidance of that gradual curvature whereby the protected front becomes convex, and the unprotected back concave. This change occurs through the slow loss of water from the back of the panel—a loss which is generally accompanied by a loss of some of the organic constituents of the wood through oxidation. Here it may be mentioned that the original steaming of the panel removes some of the extractives, and coagulates the albuminoids present, which are generally the first cause


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344 ingeniously fitted in, though not found in situ, and a large rift on one side had been still more cleverly repaired with wooden patches caulked with moss. No metal had been used in any part of it. The boat was found embedded in the blue and brown clay which underlies the peat, and is considered on geological evidence, which is given with great detail, to be from 2600 to 3000 years old. It was offered by Mr. Cary Elwes to the British Museum, but was declined as being too large; it is, however, now suitably housed at Brigg.

Many similar oaken boats of smaller dimensions have been discovered in various parts of England, and I saw one myself which had been just dug out of a peat bed close to Shapwick Station, in Somersetshire, in September 1906, which was 20 feet long by 2 feet 10 inches wide.

At Brigg an ancient causeway was discovered, which is described by Mr, Claye in the same pamphlet, and a photograph given. This roadway was found in a brickyard lying between the two branches of the river, under a deposit of blue alluvial clay, and above the forest bed which lies on the top of the glacial drift, and was probably made by the early Britons to secure a safe passage across the valley when it was little more than a swamp. Small trees and branches of yew were laid lengthwise, and across them rough planks of oak, which were fixed in their place by long wooden pins driven through holes at each end. From the photograph the wood appears to have been well preserved, but having been covered up again shortly after the excavation was made, I can give no further details of its condition. In the same place was discovered a sort of raft or flat-bottomed boat, 4o feet long and 6 feet wide, which was also covered up again. From the illustration given, this seems to have been made of five logs placed side by side, and held together by cross ties passing through holes in projections on the upper side of the logs.

In the foundations of Winchester Cathedral, oak piles had been used to form a solid foundation in the wet peaty soil on which part of the structure rested. When the Cathedral was under restoration in 1906, samples of these piles sent me by Mr. Jackson, the architect of the work, who said that they were put down in the time of William Rufus, were in places decayed. Some logs of beech laid horizontally under the same building, which Mr. Jackson attributes to Bishop de Lucy, about 1206, remained comparatively sound, and, though the wood has changed from its natural colour to a grey, is fit to use as boards for bookbinding.

With regard to the foundations of the Campanile at Venice, it has been stated that they were laid on larch piles, which are still used in that city for the same purpose; but when I was at Venice in 1905 I inquired into this, and was given a section of an oak pile only about 6 inches in diameter, but perfectly sound and very hard, which was cut from one of the piles taken from the foundation of the Campanile after it fell.


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346 empty cones remaining on the branches for several years. Seeds, two on each scale, with a translucent wing, which remains coalesced with the seed, covering it entirely on the upper side, and extending for some distance along its outer edge.

The genus is confined to the temperate and colder regions of the northern hemisphere, and comprises about fourteen described species. Four of these, yen we have not seen either growing wild or in cultivation, will now be briefly alluded to.

Larix Cajanderi, Mayr, ''Fremdländ. Wald- u. Parkbäume,'' 297, fig. 88 (1906). Discovered by Dr. Cajander in eastern Siberia, where it occurs along the banks of the river Lena from the mouth of the Aldan at 68° N. lat. northwards to 72° N. lat., becoming here a stunted tree only 10 to 20 feet in height. It usually forms mixed woods with the Siberian spruce or Betula odorata, assuming in wet soil the same appearance as is presented by L. americana in the swamps of Wisconsin; or on unflooded land growing pure to a height of about 70 feet. Judging from the description it is closely allied to, if not a mere variety of, L. dahurica. The young branchlets are yellowish brown with scattered hairs, older branchlets becoming ashy grey. The leaves are very long, up to 2 inches in length; and are accompanied on the opening of the bud by a tuft of dense whitish pubescence, which is absent in L. dahurica. The cones are small, with about twenty scales, which gape widely when ripe, and are broad and concave on the upper margin.

Larix Principis Rupprechtii, Mayr, op. cit. 309, figs. 87, 94, 95 (1906). This species was discovered by Mayr on the Wu Tai mountain in the province of Shansi in northern China; and appears to resemble strongly the European larch, from which it differs in the cone-scales being finely denticulate and glabrous, with bracts short and only visible towards the base of the cone. This species has been introduced into Europe by Mayr, who brought a living plant to Grafrath, near Munich, which is growing there very vigorously.

Larix kamtschatika, Carrière, Conif. 279 (1855); Abies kamtschatika, Ruprecht, ''Beit. Pflanzenkund. Russ. Reich.'' ii. 57; Pinus kamtschatika, Endlicher, Conif. 135 (1847). This species, which occurs in Kamtschatka, is said to differ from L. dahurica in having larger cones. It is imperfectly known, and has not been introduced.

Larix chinensis, Beissner, ''Mitteil. Deutsch. Dendrol. Gesell. 1896, p. 68, and 1901, p. 76; and Nuov. Giorn. Bot. Ital.'' iv. 183, t. 5 (1897). A tree, dimensions of which are not stated. Branchlets yellow, glabrous. Leaves up to 1¼ inch long, triangular in section, stomatose on the under surface. Cones ovoid-cylindrical, 1½ to 2 inches long; scales numerous, orbicular, entire, coriaceous, furrowed and tomentose on the outer surface, standing horizontally in the opened cones; bracts lanceolate, truncate at the narrowed apex, with a short mucro, extending considerably beyond the upper margin of the scale, and appressed and not recurved in the unripe cone. Seeds about $1/6$ inch in length with a broad wing slightly exceeding the seeds in length.

This species, specimens of which I have recently seen in the Museum at Florence, was discovered at 10,000 feet altitude in the Peling mountains of Shensi in China by Père Giraldi in 1893. Beissner has raised seedlings from seeds sent in


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32 of decay. This decay is not primarily a chemical and spontaneous one, but is commenced by certain minute organisms, the growth and increase of which is, in part, dependent upon the presence of available albuminoids, but which involves also the destruction of some of the other extractives, and even of the ligno-cellulose itself. The corrosive sublimate employed helps to sterilize the wood, and to prevent the inroads of animal organisms.

In order to avoid the disastrous effects of transverse shrinkage upon compound panels, the old painters glued linen cloth, or vellum, or parchment, or tinfoil to the front surface of the wood, and on this they spread their gesso or painting-ground. Gesso, made of plaster of Paris and size, or of whitening and size, often lost its cohesion through the decay of the binding material, and in consequence became fragile and powdery ; the panel itself decayed, and thus at last the linen or parchment remained as the best preserved element of the composite structure. Were we to avoid gesso and use lead-primed canvas glued to panel, we should really be painting upon canvas backed or protected by wood. Panel is to be recommended for modern work only when a single piece of uniform and well-seasoned wood of sufficient size can be secured. However, an excellent cement for joining panels together was sometimes used with success. It consisted of lime and cheese, both in fine powder, the latter having been grated, and then washed with water. These materials intimately mixed and then ground into a paste with water, yield a tough and adhesive cement which becomes of rocky hardness.

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and his family lived as tenants in the house of a brother peasant. He owned no land and had no home of his own. His name was Simeon, and he supported his wife and children by hard work at his trade. The cost of living was dear, while wages were low, and the shoemaker's earnings were barely sufficient to buy the necessary food. He had only one fur coat for himself and wife. As this garment contained many holes and was nearly worn out, he had been trying for more than a year to save enough money for the purchase of a new sheep-skin coat. By the autumn he had accumulated a little money—three rubles were lying in his


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12 wife’s trunk, and five rubles were due him from peasants in the neighborhood.

One morning Simeon went to the village to buy the long-coveted coat, wearing his wife's jacket (which was lined with raw cotton) and over it a woollen kaftan (peasant's outer garment). Cutting a walking-stick from the limb of a tree, and putting a crisp green bill representing three rubles in his pocket, he started on his journey immediately after his breakfast. He thought to himself: "I will receive five rubles from the moujiks [peasants], and, adding my three, I will be able to purchase enough sheepskins to make a coat."

At length the shoemaker arrived at the village, and, calling at the house of one peasant, was informed that he was not in, his wife promising in a week to send the money with her husband. Greatly disappointed, the poor man then visited another house; but the peasant declared that he had no money, though he gave him twenty kopecks for mending his shoes.


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Rh Failing to secure a sufficient number of rubles with which to purchase the sheepskins, the shoemaker decided to obtain them on credit, but could not find a dealer who was willing to trust him. Each merchant to whom he applied said: "Bring the money in hard cash, and you can take your choice of the sheepskins in my store; but otherwise you cannot have them, as we know from experience what a difficult matter it is to collect debts."

Poor Simeon was unable to succeed in his undertaking, for he received only the twenty kopecks for repairing the shoes, and got from another peasant a pair of old felt ones to cover with leather. He worried a great deal and went into a tavern to drink, where he spent the entire twenty kopecks, returning to his home without the sheepskins for his coat. The morning was cold, but after drinking so much vodki (whiskey) he felt quite warm. He then turned his steps homeward, having in one hand the cane, with which he struck the frozen objects he en-


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 14 countered on the road, and in the other hand he carried the old felt shoes he had taken to cover. As he walked along he conversed in cheerful tones with himself.

"I feel quite warm enough," he said, "without the fur overcoat. That glass of vodki which I drank sends the blood like fire coursing through my veins, and it is not necessary to fasten my sheepskin coat. I am returning home after having banished all my sorrow. See what kind of a man I am! What matters anything tome now? I can live without a coat. What care I if I have to do without a coat for all eternity? Only one thing worries me, and that is my poor wife. She will be dreadfully grieved. Yes, it is very annoying. You work for a man and he refuses to pay you. Very well; if he does not soon bring me the money I will take his hat. I call upon God to be my witness that I will do so. How strange it all seems! He pays me only twenty kopecks at a time. Well, what can I do witht wenty kopecks? It is only


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A General View from Mandalay Hill


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348 ::** Young branchlets glabrous.
 * † Branchlets yellowish grey in colour.
 * 8. Larix europæa, De Candolle. Europe.
 * Branchlets of the second year shining, glabrous, yellowish grey.
 * 8. Larix sibirica, Ledebour, var. Russia.
 * †† Branchlets brown in colour.
 * 9. Larix americana, Michaux. North America.
 * 10. Larix dahurica, Turczaninow. Siberia.
 * 10. Larix occidentalis, Nuttall, var.
 * 10. Larix dahurica, Turczaninow. Siberia.
 * 10. Larix occidentalis, Nuttall, var.
 * 10. Larix occidentalis, Nuttall, var.
 * 10. Larix occidentalis, Nuttall, var.

Mayr says that though the various species of larch seem very different at the first sight, yet that they all have the same biological character, and are all inhabitants of the coldest limits of the forest, whether produced by latitude or altitude, and that when introduced into warmer regions or zones, they lose their economic usefulness through premature fruitfulness or fungoid attacks. This opinion, though so often expressed in various forms by foresters of continental experience, is not strictly applicable to Great Britain, as the pages of this work will prove; and though the liability to spring frost is greater with the more northern and alpine species, yet in their native countries larches are also subject to frosts during almost every month in the year, and though the young shoots in spring and the unripened wood in autumn are often much injured by frost, yet no trees have a greater power of recovering from injuries produced by climatic influences, provided the soil is suitable; and Mayr truly says that the warmer the climate in which the larch is cultivated the better the soil it requires. He considers that the timber of all larches is practically of equal value, its quality depending on the slowness at which it is grown, rather than on the species or origin of the parent tree.


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THE STORY OF EXPLORATION

BEING

THE STORY OF EXPLORATION FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES IN BURMA, MALAYA SIAM AND INDO-CHINA

BY

HUGH CLIFFORD, C.M.G.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS AND MAPS

AND WITH MAP IN COLOURS

BY J. G. BARTHOLOMEW

NEW YORK

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

PUBLISHERS


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 Copyright, 1904,

Published in September, 1904


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 TO

DÊMS

THIS BOOK IS LOVINGLY DEDICATED

IN MEMORY OF

THE DAYS DURING WHICH

IT WAS WRITTEN


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350 cone. Scales in four to five spiral rows, nine to ten scales in each row, about 4 inch broad and long, convex from side to side but flattened longitudinally, with the apex usually retuse, often emarginate or rounded; margin thin, entire, not bevelled, and neither inflexed nor recurved; outer surface light brown pubescent, the pubescence most marked towards the base. Bracts oblong, widest at the base, truncate or rounded at the apex, with a short mucro extending about half-way up the scale. Seeds in shallow depressions on the scale, with wings narrowly divergent and extending almost quite to its upper and outer margin; body of the seed $1/6$ inch long, wing short and broad, widest near the base; seed with wing less than ½ inch long; wing $1/5$ inch broad.

The flowers of the common larch are occasionally white in colour. This occurs both in the wild state and in cultivated trees, as at Arley Castle.

Various kinds of weeping larch have been found wild or have originated in cultivation: and some have been propagated by grafting. ''Var. pendula,'' Lawson, is noted by Loudon, who states that there were large trees of this kind at Dunkeld, which had been raised from Tyrolese seed. In this form there is an erect leader, and the branches are spreading or even ascending, the branchlets being very slender, elongated, and quite pendulous. In another form of weeping larch the habit is quite different, as it has no tendency to form an erect leader, the trunk remaining short and often divided near the top into several secondary stems that are bent downwards, as are the branches and branchlets. A remarkable example of the latter form, with extremely long slender pendulous branchlets, was growing in 1888 in Mr. Maurice Young's nursery at Milford. ''Var. pendulina, Regel, Gartenflora,'' 1871, p. 101, does not seem to be essentially different in habit from this. Loudon mentions a remarkable pendulous larch at Henham Hall, Suffolk, which was planted in 1800, and was supported on pillars, the main branches forming a covered alley 80 feet long and 16 feet wide in 1841. I am informed by Mr. Simpson, gardener at Henham Hall, that this tree is now in good health, the tall shrubs which surrounded it having been cleared away on one side some three years ago, since when it has made surprising growth. At three feet from the ground it measures 8 feet 2 inches in girth, and at about eight feet forms an angle, and extends laterally for a great distance, being supported on pillars and cross pieces which form a pergola 140 feet long, 8 feet high, and 10 to 14 feet wide, which is almost completely covered by its branches, and will shortly require extension. In a note at Kew, dated 1882, Sir J. Hooker mentions a weeping European larch at Waterer's nursery, Bagshot, which was 50 feet high and had the habit of Larix Griffithii.


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 CONTENTS


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 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


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Rh mixture consisting partly of parchment-size, partly of fish-glue, and whitening.

It is very probable that some of the hard, fine-grained woods of British India and of North Borneo will furnish excellent materials for picture-panels. At present experiments in this direction cannot be regarded as more than tentative and promising.


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 FURTHER INDIA

CHAPTER I

CHRYSE THE GOLDEN AND THE CHERSONESUS AUREA

HE great peninsula which forms the south-eastern corner of the Asiatic continent, comprising, as we know it to-day, Burma, Siam, French Indo-China and the Malay Peninsula, will be found, in comparison with other regions of the East, to have suffered at the hands of Europeans from a wholly unmerited neglect. Latterly, it is true, the Powers of the West have been busy here, as in other quarters of the world; but in spite of their new-born political importance only a languid interest has, for the most part, been excited in the countries themselves and in the problems to which their affairs have given rise. The failure of the lands of southeastern Asia to make a strong appeal to the imagination of the peoples of Europe is to be ascribed, however, not to their intrinsic unimportance, nor yet to any lack of wealth, of beauty, of charm, or of the interest that springs from a mysterious and mighty past. The reason is to be sought solely in the mere accident of their geographical position. Lying as they do midway upon the great sea-route which leads


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Part of the World according to Pomponius Mela

From Bunbury's "History of Ancient Geography"


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Ptolemy's Further India, as interpreted in the XVth Century

From the Roman Ptolemy of 1490


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Part of the World according to Ptolemy

From Bunbury's "History of Ancient Geography"


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Odoric

From the Cittadino Italiano


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The World, according to Erdisi

The World, according to Masudi


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Marco Polo, from a painting in the Gallery of Monsignore Badia at Rome

From the book of Ser Marco Polo (by permission of Mr. John Murray)


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 CHAPTER II

THE MEDIEVAL WANDERERS

HE first of the European wanderers in the Far East, the personal narrative of whose adven- tures has come down to us, is Messer Marco Polo, the Venetian. The wonderful story of the great overland journey made by this traveller in the company of his father and uncle when they set out from Constan- tinople" to traverse the world," will be dealt with in a sep- arate volume, and need not here be recapitulated in detail. For us the travels of Marco Polo begin and end with his passage across the seas and amidst the islands of south- eastern Asia on his return journey from Cathay to Europe. And once again the fate, which we have noted as doom- ing the Indo-Chinese peninsula to obscurity, causes this portion of Marco Polo's narrative to be more tangled and more destitute of detail than almost any other chapters in his book. The slovenliness of his descriptions of the countries between Champa, or Chamba, as he calls it, and Ceylon, and the scant measure of reliable fact which is to be extracted from his account of his journey, moved the late Mr. John Crawfurd to contemptuous in- dignation. "The information communicated," he declares, is more like what might be expected from a Chinese than a European traveller, and the author who had gone to China at eighteen, and lived there for twenty


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 CHAPTER III

THE COMING OF THE FILIBUSTERS

T was in November, 1497, that Vasco da Gama, after those two desperate beatings to seaward and tacks to the south which have made him famous, during which he faced and overcame, not only the fury of the elements, but the fears and the mutinous murmur- ings of his comrades, came at last to land on the eastern shores of southern Africa. The story of the last great tack is told to us by Gaspar Correa in a fashion which leaves a wonderful picture upon our memories, and his words may fittingly be quoted here.

"As he (da Gama) was a very choleric man, at times with angry words he made them silent, although he well saw how much reason they had at every moment to despair of their lives and they had been going for about two months on that tack, and the masters and pilots cried out to him to take another tack; but the captain major did not choose, though the ships were now letting in much water, by which their labours were doubled, be- cause the days were short and the nights long, which caused them increased fear of death; and at this time they met with such cold rains that the men could not move. All cried out to God for mercy upon their souls, for now they no longer took heed of their lives. It now seemed to Vasco da Gama that the time was come for


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 CHAPTER IV

THE EXPLORATIONS OF THE PORTUGUESE

HE circumstances which led to the establish- ment of the Portuguese Power in Malacca have been examined in the preceding chapter with a minuteness which is only warranted by the fact that this event marks, as has been already observed, the beginning of a new epoch in the exploration of southeastern Asia. Over the explorations which followed upon the settle- ment of Malacca we shall now have to pass with much less of detail and particularity, partly because consider- ations of space forbid more elaborate treatment of this single portion of our subject, and partly because the records of many wanderings are lost to us, while those which exist are too often of a very fragmentary character.

From the despatch by Dalboquerque of embassies to Siam, to Java and to several Sumatran kingdoms, and from the launching by him of the exploring fleet to the Moluccas, dates the gradual founding of commercial posts by white adventurers throughout southeastern Asia and the Malayan Archipelago. Malacca stood to each of these as a base of operations; the prestige of Malacca served to protect isolated outposts and individual traders; and the rumour of the wealth which was to be won in these regions speedily caused a host of hungry folk to


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 CHAPTER V

THE EAST INDIA COMPANIES, AND AFTER

HERE is a certain characteristic irony in the fact that the nation whose king enjoyed the title of "The Eldest Son of the Church" should have been the first of all the peoples of Europe to set at defiance the Bull of Alexander VI. In 1528 the brothers Jean and Raoul Parmentier of Dieppe sailed from France, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and penetrated as far south and east as Sumatra, where Jean, the leader and the inspiring genius of the adventure, died in the following year. His friend, the poet Pierre Crignon, who sailed with him, says of his dead captain:

"C'est le premier François qui a découvert les Indies jusques à l'isle de Taprobane, et si mort ne l'eust pas prévenu je crois qu'il eust été jusques au Moluques."

This, however, was not to be, and though the French broke through the ring-fence of Portugal before any other nation of Europe had ventured to do so, their efforts were isolated and of no importance. The first organised chal- lenge to the monopoly enjoyed by the Portuguese in Asia emanated from the city of London, England once again playing the part which has earned for her so much hatred among the nations of the Continent—that of chief thwarter of individual ambitions.

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 CHAPTER VI

FRANCIS GARNIER, THE MAN

N the preceding chapters the knowledge gained by Europeans of the lands of southeastern Asia has been traced from its earliest beginnings, in the im- aginary island of Chryse, the Golden, until by the seven- teenth century the coast-lines of the whole of the vast Indo-Chinese peninsula had become familiarly known to the geographers and merchants of the West. Similarly we have followed the growth of knowledge of this part of the world, and the events which contributed to it, until in the nineteenth century the spread of European influ- ence in Burma, in Malaya and in Cochin-China and Kam- bodia opened the gates to enquiry and made the scientific exploration of the Hinterland a possibility. The work lay now ready to the hand, and of all the men who took a share in it and succeeded in writing their names large upon the maps of these regions, Francis Garnier, the Frenchman, the naval officer, colonial ad- ministrator, explorer, cartographer, man of letters and dreamer of dreams, is perhaps the most arresting figure,

It is no part of my present plan to attempt a biography of Francis Garnier; our concern is with his achievement rather than with his character. Yet in order that a true appreciation of the former may be arrived at, something must be known of the latter. Its keynote is to be


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 CHAPTER VII

THE PROBLEM OF THE KHMER CIVILISATION

DESPATCH-BOAT had been sent to Bangkok by the Colonial Government for the purpose of obtaining passports and a supply of Siamese money of which the expedition would stand in need. when it quitted Kambodian territory and began to make its way through districts under the dominion of Siam. Pending the return of this vessel, the main design of the explorers the—ascent of the Mekong to its source—could not be proceeded with, and De Lagrée decided to utilise the time of forced inactivity by paying a visit to the immense ruins of Angkor, the most remarkable of the many relics of a forgotten civilisation which are to be found scattered throughout Kambodia, in the districts of Siamreap and Batambang (which had been wrested from that kingdom by Siam), and in some parts of the Laos country. De Lagrée, while serving as political officer in Kambodia, had visited Angkor on more than one occasion, and had taken a scientific interest in its monuments and in the problems which they present for solution. Neither he nor any of his companions, how- ever, can claim to be regarded as in any sense the dis- coverers of these ruins, their existence having first become known to Europeans as early as 1570, as we shall pres- ently see. None the less, the accident of their sojourn at


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T was only on July 7, 1866, that the de Lagrée-Garnier expedition at last began its ascent of the Mekong River from Pnom Penh. A short visit was paid to the pagoda of Pnom-Brashe, an ancient Khmer ruin situated opposite to the Sutin islands. This is a magnificent temple, in general appearance not unlike a Gothic cathedral, and according to an inscription found in it, a translation of which was furnished to the explorers by a Buddhist monk, it dates from the second century of our De Lagrée, who found it impossible to get over the difficulty presented by the omission from the manuscript of the Chinese ambassador of all mention of Angkor Wat, thought that the town described in that work was to be looked for in the neighbourhood of Pnom-Brashe, but there is little to be advanced in favour of this view, since the account of the capital of Kambodia as it was in the thirteenth century corresponds in almost every detail with Angkor Thôm, and is not applicable in an equal degree to any other of the great Khmer remains.

On July 9th, Kratieh, on the left bank just below the Sombor rapids, was reached, and here the two shallow-draft gunboats, in which the expedition had so far been conveyed, were abandoned. Up to this time, no steamers


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CANVAS

usual, and probably the best fibre for the manufacture of canvas for painting is unbleached flax—that is, linen; hemp and cotton are decidedly inferior. The material is woven in different ways, and with strands of different degrees of fineness, so as to produce cloths of various degrees of thickness and fineness, and having several kinds of texture and surface.

The canvas is first treated with size or a solution of glue ; this should be as free from colour as possible : the addition of honey to the size is undesirable. The priming consists of two coats, the first containing whitening and size, the second lead white and linseed oil. Fuller primings are often given where it is not desired to allow the texture of the canvas to remain evident. Such primings are put on alternately in directions at right angles to one another, and are treated in the same way as the primings of panel. If before the last priming be dry it be dusted with zinc white, or if a very thin final priming of zinc white and drying oil (free from lead) be given, the usual discoloration of the canvas which occurs on keeping it, especially in the dark, will be avoided. But such discoloration can always be removed by leaving in contact with the priming a piece of blotting-paper saturated with a solution of


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 CHAPTER IX

UBON TO LUANG PRABANG—MOUHOT AND OTHER EXPLORERS

URING the two months spent by Francis Gar- nier in making the flying visit to Pnom Penh described in the preceding chapter, the rest of the expedition had continued its explorations around. Ubon and to the north. The province of Ubon at this time supported a population estimated at 80,000 souls, and the chief object of interest was the salt-pans which supply the natives of the district with a large part of their livelihood. A patch of country some forty miles in length, on the plateau of Ubon, appears to cover great reservoirs of brine, and each dry season the salt is precipitated on the surface in the form of a white, powdery dust. This is collected by the natives, cleansed in water, and is once more precipitated in a purified condition in large caldrons, which are exposed to the rays of the sun. A single worker wins about fifteen pounds per diem, and the in- dustry is in full swing for a period of three months. As soon as the dry season shows signs of breaking, the ground from the surface of which the salt has been gathered is sown with rice; good crops are obtained, and the soil thus yields, as it were, two harvests annually to its owners.

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 CHAPTER X

THE SHAN STATES AND YUN-NAN

T Luang Prabang, in spite of a certain frigidity which at first marked the relations of the au- thorities with his party, de Lagrée's tact and firmness speedily succeeded in overcoming the prejudices of the natives. He obtained an audience of the King on conditions honourable to himself, and was well treated in the matter of accommodation and provisions. But he found the opposition raised to the continuance of his journey less easy to remove. The Muhammadan rebellion in Yun-nan had been the signal for endless disorders in the Shan States which owed allegiance to China, and Luang Prabang had seized the opportunity thus afforded to omit sending the customary tribute, the contention. of its authorities being that the roads to Yun-nan were impassable. It was therefore against their interests that a small party of Europeans should penetrate into China and so demonstrate the thinness of this pretext, and much was made of the difficulties which were declared to lie ahead of the explorers.

Three routes were open to de Lagrée's choice: firstly, that which led up the valley of the Mekong; secondly, that up the Nam Hu, a left influent of the great river; and lastly, the route to Kwang Si, which traverses coun- try inhabited by mixed tribes situated between China and Tongking. The first route was also the longest, and it


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 CHAPTER XI

JOURNEYS OF EXPLORATION IN BURMA

HE Burmese war of 1826 forced upon the atten- tion of the Government of India a recognition of the perilously scant measure of knowledge at its disposal concerning the topography of the country lying beyond its borders. The only part of upper Burma which at that time was known to Europeans was the Irawadi River from Rangoon and Bassein to Ava, over which so many British envoys had travelled on humili- ating embassies. Lieutenant Woods, who accompanied Symes to Ava in 1798, had made a survey of this part of the river, and Dr. Buchanan on the same occasion had collected a considerable amount of information relating to the districts traversed. Writing in 1835, Pemberton states that to the geographical and statistical facts ascer- tained by these officers no material addition had been made up to the time of the outbreak of the first Burmese war, and he mentions that the frontier officers had been blamed for this by the Government of India. forgotten that the attitude maintained by the British authorities in Calcutta towards the Court of Ava had fostered and flattered the natural arrogance of the Bur- mese; that the humiliations inflicted with impunity upon our envoys had brought us nothing but contempt; and that the Burmese frontier chiefs, sublimely conscious of their innate superiority to a mere white man, had reso-


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 CHAPTER XII

THE FURTHER EXPLORATION OF SIAM, FRENCH INDOCHINA, AND THE MALAY PENINSULA

HE comparatively meagre knowledge possessed by Europeans concerning the geography of Siam up to the middle of the last century is well exemplified by a paper on the subject which was read before the Royal Geographical Society in London on December 10th, 1855, by Mr., afterwards Sir, Harry Parkes, who at that time occupied the position of British Consul at Bangkok. The only surveys of the country then available, he declared, were those which had been made in the course of their professional journeys by Dr. S. R. House and his fellows of the American Missions. These journeys had always been made by boat, and the surveys were taken by the somewhat primitive system known as "time and compass." The map thus com- piled, however, contained, Sir Harry Parkes wrote, " all the authentic geographical information we possess on that most important part of the Siamese dominions, the great valley of the Menam." Yet when we come to ex- amine it, the area delineated is very meagre and circum- scribed. It is covered by barely as much as two degrees of latitude, and embraces nothing beyond the lower valleys of the Menam and Meklong Rivers. Bishop Pallegoix, whose important work on Siam appeared in 1852, had penetrated somewhat farther into the interior,


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 CHAPTER XIII

CHRYSE THE GOLDEN AS IT STANDS REVEALED TO-DAY

HE story of the exploration of south-eastern Asia by Europeans—and Europeans, for our purposes, are the only true explorers—has now been told. We have seen the first dim dawning of the idea that the Gangetic Valley was not in truth the most easterly limit of the habitable world that beyond it lay other lands, to which distance lent the glamour of mys- tery and of romance. We have seen how Chryse the Golden, the earliest conception of which was an island of paltry extent lying over against the mouths of the Ganges, began at last to find a place upon the maps of the ancient geographers; how later this germ of truth developed into the Golden Chersonese of Ptolemy and Marinus of Tyre. Thereafter we have watched the growth of knowledge of south-castern Asia, fostered first. by the adventurous Arabian and Persian traders, who so long held the commercial empire of the East after the rise of the Power of Islâm, then extended little by little by the tales brought home to Europe by the medieval. wanderers of Italy. Next, with the dawning of the six- teenth century, came the invasion of the East by the Portuguese, the events of which, in so far as they affect Chyrse the Golden, have been examined in so much de- tail in a section of this work. After that period of


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Rh hydrogen peroxide: a slight warmth greatly hastens the bleaching process.

Some painters in oil have employed with success a tempera-priming on their canvases. This priming may be prepared with a mixture of a strong, though elastic, size, with whitening. A good composition of this sort may be made by taking equal weights of fine whitening and of fine plaster of Paris, which has been slaked in and soaked with abundance of clean water, or of the preparation called satin-finish, an artificial gypsum, used by paper-makers: the warm size is incorporated with this mixture. When the priming coats are dry the surface is dressed with a layer of pure size, and allowed to harden thoroughly before the picture is begun.

An ordinary primed canvas was examined with the following results. The amount of moisture present was 5*5 per cent, of its weight, the priming 25 per cent., and the dry substance of the size 15. The dry fibre which constituted the remaining constituent would weigh, therefore, about 54 parts. It was further found, with the same canvas, in a dry heat of 100° C. (212° F.) continued for twenty minutes, that a strip 20 inches long became shorter by a quarter of an inch, changing in colour from a creamy white to a pale buff. After immersion in boiling water for twenty minutes a piece of this canvas 20 inches square was found to have shrunk more than i inch in one direction, and in the other direction rather more than half an inch. The piece was somewhat crinkled, and had become yellow in patches.

A few remarks as to the bearing of the above observations on some of the phenomena presented by oil-paintings on canvas may be here introduced. The water present in canvas varies with the temperature, and in consequence


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 from India to China, it has been the fate of these countries to be overshadowed from the beginning by the immensity and the surpassing fascination of their mighty neighbours. Thus, even when India and Cathay had emerged at last from the nebulous haze of myth, superstition and conjecture with which the imaginations of Europeans had early enshrouded them, southeastern Asia continued to be wrapped in obscurity, such knowledge of it as was possessed being practically confined to a bare acquaintance with its coast-lines, with a few ports of call, and with the seas traversed by ships in their passage from the shores of Malabar to the southern provinces of China. Similarly, in our own time, while every schoolboy can point out Canton or Peking, Delhi or Peshwur, as a matter of course, not one educated man in fifty can put his finger unhesitatingly upon the spot on the map which represents Chieng Tong or Bhamo, Pahang or Pnom-Penh. The real exploration of this region, beyond the limits of a narrow zone of coastlands, was not accomplished until during the latter half of the nineteenth century, while the work done in this direction by Francis Garnier and a host of smaller men is even less known in these islands than are the localities in which their labours were performed.

It is not easy to realise to how late a period in their history the Greeks remained in almost total ignorance of the Eastern world, or indeed of any inhabited lands lying at a distance from the seaboard of the Mediterranean. It was not until the invasion of Xerxes forced the fact upon


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 their attention in uncompromising wise that they completely grasped the proximity of Persia. Hecatæus of Miletus, who wrote between 520 and 500, is the first of the ancients to make mention of India and the Indus by name, and Megasthenes, who was in the service of the Syrian King, Seleucus Nicanor, during the third century , was the earliest writer to extend the western acquaintance with the East to the banks of the Ganges. He traversed the great peninsula from the Indus to the former river by means of what he describes as "the royal road"—probably the first of the grand trunk-roads of India—crossed successively the Sutlej and the Jumna, and descended the Ganges to Palibothra, a town at the mouth of the Sone which was the capital of a king called Sandracottus (Chandra-gupta). He brought back with him much detailed information concerning the country, its people and its products, and he speaks of cinnamon and other spices as being imported from the southern parts of India, which may possibly be an indication of the existence, even in his time, of the spice-trade of the Malayan Archipelago.

It was not, however, until after the beginning of our era that the first, faintest hint reached Europe concerning the existence of lands lying to the east of the Ganges. It is found in the writings of Pomponius Mela, whose date can be fixed from internal evidence at 43, which make mention of a headland named Tabis, described by the author as the most easterly extremity of Asia, and of another, apparently further to the south, called Tamus. Off the latter lay Chryse, or the Golden


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 Isle, while Argyre, the Isle of Silver, was opposite to the mouth of the Ganges. Pomponius Mela places the land of the Seres—the name by which the inhabitants of northern China were known—south of Tabis and between that headland and India. These statements, though they represent nothing more than a vague groping after the truth, are interesting because they mark the dawn of a pcrccption that beyond the Ganges there lay further to the east certain inhabited lands, and because they show that in Pomponius Mela's time the Seres were recognised as occupying country at the extreme east of the Asiatic continent. Concerning Chrysc itself Pomponius Mcla, it is probable, entertained no very definite ideas, but his mention of the mythical isle indicates that a new geographical conception had come into being. Henceforth the Ganges was no longer to be regarded as the eastern limit of the habitable world. The map of the earth according to Pomponius Mela, here reproduced from Mr. F. H. Bunbury's admirable History of Ancient Geography, shows the distorted character of his notions concerning the configuration of the seas and continents; but in the insignificant island of Chryse, there seen lying off the promontory of Tamus, we must recognise the earliest attempt ever made by a European to locate the lands of southeastern Asia.

It was about this time, as we learn from the works of Pliny the Elder and from that of the anonymous author of the Periplus of the Erythræan Sea, both of which belong to the latter half of the first century, that a great revolution was worked in Asiatic navigation. Pliny tells


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 us that the southwest monsoon was called the Hippalus, and the author of the Periplus explains that "a pilot named Hippalus was the first, who, from observing the position of the ports, and the configuration of the sea, discovered the mode of sailing right across the open sea; from which the name of Hippalus is given to the local wind which blows steadily from the southwest, in the Indian seas."

The voyage of Hippalus, whose example had been so generally followed in the time of Pliny that the journey to and from India was then regularly made by many ships every year, marks an epoch in the story of navigation. Up to this time the seamen of western Asia and of Europe had not ventured out of sight of land, and the length of their voyages had been determined by the convolutions of the coast-lines which they skirted. The man who, first of all his kind, had the hardihood to face the open sea, to lose the comfortable sight of terra firma, to stake his life upon the accuracy of his own crude knowledge of geography, and to sail thus bravely into the Unknown, deserves to take rank with the world's great adventurers, with Colombus, with da Gama, with Magellan, and in that he had less of accumulated experience to fortify his resolution, he may even be accounted a greater than they.

The opening up of the direct sea-route to India thus effected served at once to give an enormous impetus to trade between Alexandria and the East, and Pliny was able to obtain first-hand information on the subject of Ceylon from four ambassadors whom a king of that


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 island sent to the Court of the Emperor Claudius. He states, among other things, that trade was carried on by the natives of Taprobane (Ceylon) with the Seres of northern China, though doubt is cast upon the matter by the fact that the Chinese arc described as fair-haired, blue-eyed giants. On the other hand it is significant that no mention is made of any commercial relations subsisting between the peoples of Ceylon and those of south-eastern Asia. This is, at the best, but negative evidence, yet it is noteworthy as seeming to indicate that the sea-route between India and China was not even then in general use, despite the fact that commercial intercourse between the two empires had been carried on overland from a period of remote antiquity.

Of Chryse, the Golden, Pliny, in fact, has nothing to tell us, and the author of the Periplus, whose personal knowledge did not extend beyond Nelkynda, probably Melisseram, on the Malabar coast, says of it only that it was situated opposite to the mouths of the Ganges and that it produced the best tortoise-shell found in all the Erythræan Sea. He speaks, however, of Thina, the land of silk, situated "where the seacoast ends externally," whence we may gather that Chryse was conceived by him as an island lying not only to the east of the Ganges, but also to the southward of the Chinese Empire. This indicates a distinct advance in knowledge, for the isle of Chryse, albeit still enveloped in a golden haze, was to the author of the Periplus a real country, and no mere mythical fairy-land. Rumours, it would seem, must have reached him concerning it—rumours upon which he


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 he could rely—and this would tend to prove that the sea-route to China via the Straits of Malacca, even though it was not yet in general use, was no longer unknown to the mariners of the East. We know that less. than a century later the sailor Alexander, from whom Marinus of Tyre derived the knowledge subsequently utilised by Ptolemy, had himself sailed to the Malay Peninsula and beyond, and it may safely be concluded. that the feasibility of this southeastern passage had become known to the seafarers of China long before an adventurer from the West was enabled to test the fact of its existence through the means of an actual voyage.

Ptolemy's views concerning the geography of south-eastern Asia, derived mainly from the works of his predecessor Marinus of Tyre, may best be appreciated by a glance at the map here reproduced from Mr. Bunbury's History of Ancient Geography. His primary misconception of the Indian Ocean as another and vaster Mediterranean was responsible for many of his geographical distortions, yet if this preconceived notion, and the bias which it imparted to his ideas, be borne in mind, it will be found that there is good reason to believe that the information supplied to him was derived originally from a man who had first-hand knowledge of the sea-route to China. Marinus had quoted the sailor Alexander as journeying from the Golden Chersonese along a coastline which "faced south"—that is to say, ran from west to east,—for a period of twenty days, until a port called Zabæ was reached. From this point, he declared, ships


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 sailed eastward of south for a still longer period until the town of Cattigara was reached. The exact locality of Cattigara has been much disputed, Mannert placing it in Borneo, while Bunbury inclines to the belief that some point on the coast of Cochin China is indicated. On the other hand Marinus and Ptolemy both expressly state that Cattigara was a city of the Sinæ, or in other words a port of southern China, and a study of the route followed at a later period by Arabian and European travellers alike reveals the fact that few ever passed on a long voyage to the eastward of the Golden Chersonese unless they were bound for the Celestial Empire. Furthermore, it will be found that it is only by taking some port of southern China as our starting point—viz., as being the town of Cattigara—that Ptolemy's itinerary can be made to have any sequence or meaning. The Sinus Magnus, which is described as the first sea crossed after leaving Cattigara, would then be the China Sea; the Promontorium Magnum, dividing it from the Sinus Perimulicus, which is perhaps identical with Marinus's Zabæ, would be some point upon the shores of Indo-China, corresponding with Champa, the kingdom which at a later period was an invariable port of call for vessels making the China voyage. Similarly, the Sinus Perimulicus itself, which is described as washing the eastern shores of the Golden Chersonese, would be the Gulf of Siam; the Golden Chersonese would be, as it is usually agreed that it is, the Malay Peninsula; and the Sinus Sabaricus, on the western. shores of the Chersonese, would correspond to the Straits of Malacca from their southern portals to the Gulf of


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 Martaban. The island of Iabadius, or Sabadius—the reading of the name is doubtful—has generally been taken to represent Java, though there appears to be slight reason for the assumption, Java lying at a considerable distance from the sea-route to China, and being to a much later time visited with comparative infrequency by travellers from the west. On the other hand, Sumatra lay close to the track of ships plying between India and the Far East; was a regular port of call from the period to which belongs the first authentic records of the China voyages; and could not fail to be sighted by ships running up the Straits of Malacca. It will be seen from the above that it is only by starting from southern China, that is by recognising Cattigara as a port of the Celestial Empire, possibly the Zayton of the medieval wanderers, or a town which preceded Zayton, as Zayton itself preceded Canton, that Ptolemy's descriptive outline can be applied to the true geographical facts of the region dealt with. No straining of probabilities becomes necessary; no statements have to be elaborately explained away; and it may be stated without fear of refutation that this ceases to be the case if any other point be taken as the site of Cattigara.

To the account of the distances said to have been supplied to Marinus by the sailor Alexander, no real importance can be attached. It was the rough estimate of a man who was probably very ignorant, and it was given to a geographer who was not averse to making a bold guess if thereby the reported facts could be forced to fit in with ideas previously conceived. The same qualifying


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 consideration must be held to apply to the direction in which ships making the voyage to Cattigara are said to have sailed after passing the Golden Chersonese. The brief examination of Ptolemy's itinerary already attempted will suffice to establish the probability that Marinus's informant had actually travelled over the sea-route to southern China, and that the geographical confusions shown in the map of the world according to Ptolemy were due less to error in the information supplied than to the faulty reasoning occasioned by misconceptions on the part of the philosophers themselves.

Although, as we have seen, the earliest indication of any conception of lands lying far to the east and south of the valley of the Ganges on the part of the learned of the West belongs to the year 43, and the first mention of the Chersonesus Aurea occurs in the works of Marinus of Tyre about a century later, it would appear that the name which the latter was the first to attach to a definite locality had become familiarly known to savants in Europe at a somewhat earlier period. This came about, it is probable, through the accounts brought back by mariners who had themselves made the voyage to this distant quarter of the earth, of whom there is no particular reason to believe that Marinus's Alexander was the first. The name itself would be suggestive of great wealth; distance would lend to it its customary enchantment; the vague information current concerning it would serve to deck it with a halo of mystery, with the glamour of romance; whence it would naturally arise that the Golden Chersonese would come to be regarded


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 as the source whence was drawn the almost fabulous riches of which history held the record.

In this connection a curious passage may be cited from Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews, which was written during the latter half of the first century, at a period, it will be noted, prior to the date of the works of Marinus of Tyre. Here, in speaking of the pilots furnished to Solomon by Hiram of Tyre, he writes:

"To whom Solomon gave this command that they should go along with his stewards to the land that of old was called Ophir, but now the Aurea Chersonesus, which belongs to India, to fetch gold."

Here, it will be remarked, Josephus speaks of the Chersonese with a certain familiarity, as of a region with the existence of which his readers would be in some sort acquainted, but apart from this he makes two very definite statements—that Ophir and the Chersonesus Aurea are one, and that Ophir belonged to India. The second of these would seem to imply that he recognised that the Chersonese was not an integral portion of India, and since the name had never been borne by any country of the West, he must have intended to convey the meaning that it lay beyond the valley of the Ganges, which in his day was recognised as the eastern boundary of Hindustan.

It is now generally held that Ophir itself was, in all probability, a mere distributing centre situated somewhere in the neighbourhood of the entrance to the Red Sea, and that the pilots of Hiram of Tyre did not guide the Stewards of Solomon to the actual source of the gold


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 which went to deck the temple of Jehovah in Jerusalem. The discovery of vast mines in southern Africa, which are believed to date from an immense antiquity, has led of late years to the conclusion that this was the region whence Solomon in his glory drew his stores of gold.

M. Auguste Pavie in the second volume of his monumental work on Indo-China contends that ancient Kambodia is the original Ophir, and that to the whole of the vast peninsula, rather than to its southern portion of Malaya, was applied in ancient days the name of the Chersonesus Aurea. The wonderful civilisation of the Khmers which brought into being the splendid buildings of Angkor, of which more will be said in a later chapter, testifies to the existence of a mighty empire in Indo-China which must once have been a centre of wealth and commerce. The vast siltage, borne down from the remote interior by the floods of the Mekong, has changed the face of the country within historical times, and Angkor Thom itself, now distant nearly two hundred miles from the coast, was once a seaport. That the Khmer Empire must in its day have played an important part in the history of eastern Asia cannot be doubted, but M. Pavie's arguments, plausible though they often are, fail to carry conviction when he seeks to prove the identity of Kambodia with Ophir. Also, as regards his contention that the whole of Indo-China was included in the term the Golden Chersonese, it is difficult to believe that what is in fact an immense peninsula was ever recognised as such by the early mariners and geographers. Its bulk is too


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 great for its peninsular character to be easily or immediately appreciated, while the Malay Peninsula, that long and slender tongue of land projecting to the south of the continent of Asia, forces an understanding of its nature upon the least scientific and observant traveller.

In these circumstances M. Pavie's arguments seem to be impossible of acceptance, and the recent discovery in the Malayan State of Pahang—the home of apes and ivory and peafowl—of immense gold mines of very ancient date and of a workmanship that has no counterpart in southeastern Asia, supplies an ample reason for the designation of "golden" so long applied to the Chersonese. Here, hidden away under the shade of the primeval forest, are excavations which must have yielded in their time tons of the precious metal, and if Josephus spoke truly, and did not, as is more probable, merely hazard a bold conjecture, here perhaps are to be found in the heart of the Chersonesus Aurea the mines of Solomon the King. Of the race that worked them, of the slaves who toiled and suffered and died therein, we to-day possess no clue, for this, the story of the earliest exploration of a portion of southeastern Asia, is lost to us forever. Here, however, at the very outset of our enquiry, we obtain a glimpse of one of those pregnant suggestions wherewith Asia impresses our imaginations. by virtue of her antiquity, her wonder and her mystery. Hers is the land of buried story, of hidden records, of forgotten romance. The East baffles while she fascinates us: fascinates because she baffles. Sphinx-like she propounds riddles which few can answer, luring us onward


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 with illusive hopes of inspiring revelations, yet hiding ever in her splendid, tattered bosom the secrets of the oldest and least amply recorded of human histories.

After the time of Ptolemy there follows a long and barren period during which little advance in geographical knowledge was made by the nations of the West, nor is it until the sixth century that anything resembling new light is thrown by a European upon the topography of southeastern Asia. Moreover the shedder of that light is himself a grotesque figure, an angry theologian bent upon proving the impossible, and moved to intense fury by the impiety of those who, touching more nearly the skirts of truth, have not the advantage of agreeing with him. This is Cosmas Indicopleustes, a monk and an Alexandrian Greek, who between 530 and 550 set himself the task of proving that the universe was fashioned after the model of the Ark made by the Children of Israel in the desert. It is not necessary to follow him through the mazes of his argument, all of which he supported by texts culled from the Scriptures, but out of the tissue of absurdities to which he pinned his faith two facts emerge. While inveighing in season and out of season against those who clung to the belief that the world was globular, and against the unspeakable naughtiness of the adherents to the poisonous doctrine of the antipodes, he displays a sound knowledge of the sea-route to China, stating that a ship after travelling sufficiently far to the east, must turn to the north, and must sail in that direction at least as far as a vessel


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 bound for Chaldea would have to run up the Straits of Hormuz to the mouths of the Euphrates" in order to reach the Celestial Empire, thus disposing once for all of Ptolemy's theory of a great southern continent enclosing the Indian Ocean upon which the land of the Sinæ, or southern Chinese, was formerly supposed to be situated. Cosmas, too, as Yule remarks, "was the earliest writer to speak of China in a matter-of-fact way, and not as a country enveloped in a half-mythical haze." In his work, therefore, we find the first written record of an appreciation on the part of a European of the true relative positions of China and of the lands of south-eastern Asia. The advance in knowledge thus indicated is not great, but it is considerably ahead of that possessed by Ptolemy, and for the sake of the truth which he was the earliest to disseminate we may forgive Cosmas the monk the farrago of nonsense with which he surrounded it, and also much of his bigotry and rage.

Meanwhile inter-Asiatic intercourse by means of the sea-routes had been steadily on the increase. It was the energy and the enterprise of Hippalus, a Greek,—or so we are led to believe by the classical writers who are on this point our only authorities—which showed the way to the Arabs and the Persians across the Indian Ocean, but during the centuries which followed upon his discovery, though an immense trade was in the hands of the merchants of Alexandria, the greatest sea-power in this quarter of the world, after the decline of the Roman Empire, was that of the Persians. As early as the middle of the second century the Romans had


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 trading-stations at Aden, on the shores of Arabia and in Socotra, while during the same period the commerical relations between the Persians and India had undergone a great expansion. Before the first half of the fifth century had ended this commerce had been considerably extended while the Roman trade had declined, and according to Masudi and Hamza of Ispahan the port of Hira was visited at this time by numbers of vessels, not only from the mainland of India, but also from distant China. The rise of the Muhammadan power, while it closed the portals of the East to the nations of Europe, gave to the Muslims the practical monopoly of Asiatic trade with the West, and during their prime the Khalifs of Baghdad were well-nigh supreme in the Indian Ocean, Muhammadan colonies were scattered broadcast over the eastern world, and in 758 the followers of the Prophet in China were sufficiently numerous to be able to cause serious disturbances in that country. The existence of these colonies too made it possible for a Muslim to travel with ease in almost any quarter of the East, and the excellent Ibn Batuta, the professional religious man who preyed upon the Faithful with such satisfaction to himself and to his victims, though he was one of the earliest to give to us a detailed account of his wanderings, was certainly not among the first Muhammadans to take advantage of the opportunities which the accident of their religion afforded to them.

It has already been noted that no mention of the sea-route to China occurs in any work prior to that of


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 of Tyre, despite the fact that the overland route from India to the Celestial Empire had been in general use from a very remote period. It is certain, however, that the existence of the former means of communication must have been known to the mariners of the Far East long before any rumour concerning it filtered through to the geographers of Europe. The overland route was still much frequented as late as the thirteenth century, when the Polos passed over it on their journey to China, and its greater antiquity would suffice to account for the fact that it was familiarly known to traders from the West who visited India long before the sea-passage had been heard of by them. It is none the less impossible to believe that the latter highway was unknown, at any rate to the natives of Southern China, some time before the beginning of our era. The Chinese civilisation is one of the most ancient in existence, presenting as it does the twin marvel of an immense antiquity and of a precocious development inexplicably arrested. The Chinese are said to have understood the use of the mariner's compass as early as 2634, and though there is reason to question the accuracy of this statement, their written records concerning the properties of the lodestone date from early in the second century of our era, and it is thought that the compass was in practical use long before the earliest treatise of this kind which has come down to us. If this were so, it is at least possible that Chinese seamen were accustomed to venture out of sight of land before ever Hippalus made his way across the Indian Ocean, and a glance at the map will show that


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 few opportunities for doing so would occur unless voyages from the point of Kambodia to the Malay Peninsula and the islands of the Archipelago, or again from the Straits of Malacca to Ceylon and India had become habitual.

We may conclude with a fair show of probability that the littorals of the China Sea, the Gulf of Siam and the Straits of Malacca were explored by the seamen of China not earlier than the coast-line between the mouths of the Indus and the Straits of Hormuz was skirted by the fleet of Alexander under Nearchus in the fourth century

Again, the unmistakable impress of Hindu influence which is to be detected in the architecture of the Khmers of Kambodia, several of whose buildings date from 200, demonstrates the fact that intercourse between India and Indo-China must have been frequent at a very early period, and such intercourse would almost certainly have been conducted by sea. It has even been accepted by many as a fact that Gauthama Buddha himself visited Kambodia, and if this were so—the matter is one which is hardly susceptible of mathematical proof—it would presuppose communication between India and Indo-China as early as 500

Owing to the fact, already noted, that after the rise of the Muhammadan power the sea-borne trade between western and eastern Asia passed almost exclusively into the hands of Muslims, the first detailed accounts of the sea-route to China come to us from the Arabian and Persian geographers. The earliest Arabic manuscript of this kind belongs to the year 851, and has been edited and translated by M. Reinaud, the French


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. The first few pages of this work are lost, but its earlier portion was obviously written by one who had himself made the China voyage. The second part of the book dates from the year 916, and is the work of a certain Abu Zaid Hassan, a native of Siraf on the Persian Gulf, who, though he does not appear to have had any personal experience of the trade-route dealt with, must have enjoyed opportunities of obtaining first-hand information from those who had themselves made the voyage. The portion of the book written by the mer chant-mariner is in the nature of sailing directions, and the Arab's genius for mispronouncing foreign tongues, which is second only to that of the Englishman, causes the proper names given in the manuscript to present a series of puzzles to the enquirer. M. Reinaud himself would appear to have completely misunderstood the route indicated, and by far the best identification which has yet been suggested is to be found in an article from the pen of M. Alfred Maury in the Bulletin de Géographie for the year 1846.

It would be tedious to examine in detail the grounds for the identification of the various seas and lands there set forth, but the facts to be gathered from an examination of the somewhat wearisome itinerary laid down in the manuscript are that ships sailing from India for China took, during the ninth century, approximately the following After touching at Ceylon and the Nicobars, they came to anchor in a port near the northeastern extremity of Sumatra. Thence, after occasionally touching at a State on the western coast of the Malay


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, they made their way to the southern outlet of the Straits of Malacca, halted at the island of Bentan to take in fuel and water, or for similar purposes at an island of the Natuna group, came to port once more at some harbour either of the eastern shores of the Malay Peninsula, Siam or Kambodia, passed on to Champa, and thence to Zayton or some other port of the southern provinces of China. It will be noted that the route thus traced is practically identical with that over which we have supposed the sailor Alexander to have journeyed, and in a later chapter we shall find that a precisely similar course was followed by all the medieval travellers to and from China of whose wanderings we have a record. The sea-route via southeastern Asia had by this time become a well-beaten track, but certain ports of call were used to the exclusion of all others, and the primary value of this great highway was as a means of getting to and from China, few wanderers being tempted to stray from the appointed path which custom had marked out for ships plying in these waters.

The establishment of important commercial colonies in China by the Arabs and the Persians, concerning which Abu Zaid Hassan's portion of the manuscript furnishes some interesting particulars, presupposes that the passage to the Celestial Empire via the Straits of Malacca and the China Sea was now made by these people with great frequency, and the ports of call along that route, which seem to have been practically the same from the time of Marinus of Tyre to that of Ibn Batuta who returned from his wanderings in 1347, were also to some


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 extent used by the Arabs as settlements and trade depôts. It is obvious from internal evidence furnished by the works of Abu Zaid, of Masudi, Edrisi and Abulfeda that a few Arab mariners turned aside from the beaten track sufficiently far for Java to become a country which was comparatively well-known, but this was the exception, not the rule, and nowhere do we find reason for thinking that the Arabs ever ventured far inland, save only in China itself. In spite of a wider and surer knowledge of Malaya and Indo-China than any which at this time was possessed by Europeans, the notions entertained concerning these regions by the Arabian geographers were still very vague and imperfect. Ptolemy's misapprehension concerning the Mediterranean character of the Indian Ocean was endorsed and perpetuated by successive Arabian geographers, many of whom doubtless arrived at this false conclusion independently of their great predecessor. Some held with him that the African continent was prolonged in such fashion that it lay to the south of Malaya, while others were of opinion that the great southern terra incognita, whose existence they had deduced from unknown premises, was divided from Africa by a narrow strait. For the rest, in spite of persistent attempts to treat geographical questions in a scientific manner, and to divide the habitable world into climates, or latitudes and longitudes, the general ideas at which they arrived concerning the comparative sizes and the relative positions of various countries were extraordinarily inexact.

This is well illustrated by the two maps showing the


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 world according to Masudi and Edrisi respectively, here reproduced from M. Reinaud's excellent edition of La Geographie d' Aboulféda. Masudi, who wrote during the first half of the tenth century and who was a contemporary of Abu Zaid Hassan, had not only travelled extensively, but was also well versed in the literature of his subject and had had access to older Arabic works which have since been lost to us. His book therefore represented the widest and soundest geographical knowledge of his time, yet a glance at the chart which puts his conception of the universe before us in a convenient form suffices to demonstrate how radical were many of his misconceptions concerning the form and nature of the earth's surface, and how great was his confusion in matters of detail. For him Indo-China and Malaya consisted of one lozenge-shaped peninsula to the south of which lay Sumatra in the same latitude as Ceylon, while Java was situated further to the eastward almost on the same parallel. China itself was also a peninsula, separated from that of Indo-China by a great gulf, while far to the south of all lay a vast terra incognita which had its beginning near the south of the Sudan.

Edrisi's chart is even more confusing, although its author who lived and wrote under King Roger II of Sicily, completed his work in 1153-54. He fills almost the whole of the southern hemisphere with the African continent, makes the Mediterranean occupy an altogether disproportionate space in the universe, vastly exaggerates the size of Sicily and of Ceylon, while to neither India nor China does he give the prominence which rightly


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 belongs to it. When he passes to the eastward of Al Rami, or Sumatra, he becomes involved in inextricable confusion.

An examination of these two charts will serve better than aught else to bring home to the reader the exceedingly rudimentary state of geographical knowledge even as late as the twelfth century, yet it must be remembered that at this period the geographers of Arab nationality were far in advance of Europeans, and that, notwithstanding their many errors, substantial progress is shown by their work if it be compared with the shadowy surmises and guesses of Marinus and Ptolemy, more especially with regard to southeastern Asia.