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me that this working plan had been drawn up on lines which, however applicable to other conditions, were in some respects wasteful, and unfair to the all-important local planting industry. For instance, there was a considerable tract of forest on the north slope of the Goonipahar ridge within three or four miles of our plantation, which was full of old toon and other trees suitable for tea boxes. The toon, Cedrela toona, is, on account of its light but strong wood, preferred to all others when it can be got at a reasonable price, but these trees, though in many cases more or less decayed, could not be cut without leave from the Forest Department, until this block of forest came in its turn to be worked over. In consequence we had to buy our wood in Native Sikkim and the boards had to be carried by coolies three or four days' journey to the plantation.

After some correspondence the officer in charge of the Darjeeling forests got leave to mark and sell certain trees standing, but the transaction was surrounded by so many formalities, and the native forest guards made so many difficulties in order to get bribes from our contractor, that in the end we had to give it up altogether, and the Government lost what might have been a considerable revenue from these dead trees. To give an idea of their size, I may say that, on the banks of a river just below my plantation, there was one whose roots had been undermined by a flood, and which fell across the river, forming a capital bridge nearly 100 feet long and three to four feet in diameter. I have never seen any accurate measurements of the size of various kinds of timber in Sikkim, except those which are given in Gamble's Timbers of British India and a few examples in my own work on trees, but I do not think that they often, if ever, attain a height of 200 feet or are as large as some of the trees in Burmah, Tenasserim and Malaya.

We paid a visit to Mongpo, where the extension of the cinchona plantations was going on rapidly, and the manufacture of quinine had now been commenced.

My friend Mr. Gammie was now resident superintendent and a keen collector of birds and eggs, in which he was materially aided by the large number of coolies on the plantation. Some of the boys were clever at snaring birds on their nests, and thus enabled him to identify the eggs of a great many species whose nesting habits were previously unknown. But the variety of birds in Sikkim is so great, and some of them are so rare, or more probably so very local, that even now there are some of which we know little or nothing. On one occasion, when I was staying at Mongpo, I was riding with Gammie along the edge of a narrow gully crossed by a small bridge when he heard, in the thick scrub close below us, the note of a bird which he did not know. We sat down with our guns one on each side of the gully. It was a long time before I got a glimpse of a small brown bird with a long curved bill creeping near the ground, so close to me that I could not help spoiling it with the shot, I found it was a bird described long ago by Hodgson as Rimator malacoptilus, which we only knew from his description; and of which only two specimens, I think, had ever been got before. There were still others in the same place, and after a long time I succeeded in shooting two more, one of