came in on all sides. I
had flannel jackets and blankets and still was cold, and my poor men,
with nothing but their usual thin cotton clothes, passed miserable
nights lying on a mat on the ground round the fire which could only warm
one side at a time. The highest peak is an extinct volcano with the
crater nearly filled up, forming merely a saucer on the top, in which
is a good house built by the Government for the old Dutch naturalists
who surveyed and explored the mountain. There are a lot of strawberries
planted there, which do very well, but there were not many ripe. The
common weeds and plants of the top were very like English ones, such as
buttercups, sow-thistle, plantain, wormwood, chickweed, charlock, St.
John's wort, violets and many others, all closely allied to our common
plants of those names, but of distinct species. There was also a
honey-suckle, and a tall and very pretty kind of cowslip. None of these
are found in the low tropical lands, and most of them only on the tops
of these high mountains. Mr. Darwin supposed them to have come there
during a glacial or very cold period, when they could have spread over
the tropics and, as the heat increased, gradually rose up the mountains.
They were, as you may imagine, most interesting to me, and I am very
glad that I have ascended _one_ lofty mountain in the tropics, though I
had miserable wet weather and had no view, owing to constant clouds and
mist.

I also visited a semi-active volcano close by continually sending out
steam with a noise like a blast-furnace--quite enough to give me a
conception of all other descriptions of volcanoes.

The lower parts of the mountains of Java, from 3,000 to 6,000 feet, have
the most beautiful tropical vegetation I have ever seen. Abundance of
splendid tree ferns, some 50 ft. high, and some hundreds of varieties of
other ferns, beautiful-leaved plants as begonias, melastomas, and many
others, and more flowers than are generally seen in the tropics. In
fact, this region exhibits all the beauty the tropics can produce, but
still I consider and will always maintain that our own meadows and woods
and mountains are more beautiful. Our own weeds and wayside flowers are
far prettier and more varied than those of the tropics. It is only the
great leaves and the curious-looking plants, and the deep gloom of the
forests and the mass of tangled vegetation that astonish and delight
Europeans, and it is certainly grand and interesting a