WCP376

[1] [p. 85]

TO HIS SISTER, MRS. SIMS

In the Mountains of Java. October 10, 1861.

My dear Fanny,— I have just received your second letter in praise of your new house. As I have said my say about it in my last, I shall now send you a few lines on other subjects.

I have been staying here a fortnight 4,000 feet above the sea in a fine cool climate, but it is unfortunately dreadfully wet and cloudy. I have just returned from a three days' excursion to one of the great Java volcanoes 10,000 feet high. I slept two nights in a house 7,500 feet above the sea. It was bitterly cold at night, as the hut was merely of plaited bamboo, like a sieve, so that the wind 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 at 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 [2] [p. 86] 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 [3] 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 and in a certain sense beautiful, but not the calm, sweet, warm beauty of our own fields, and there is none of the brightness of our own flowers; a field of buttercups, a hill of gorse or of heather, a bank of foxgloves and a hedge of wild roses and purple vetches surpass in beauty anything I have ever seen in the tropics. This is a favourite subject with me, but I cannot go into it now.

Send the accompanying note to Mr. Stevens immediately. You will see what I say to him about my collections here. Java is the richest of all the islands in birds, but they are as well known as those of Europe, and it is almost impossible to get a new one. However, I am adding fine specimens to my collection, which will be altogether the finest known of the birds of the Archipelago, except perhaps that of the Leyden Museum, who have had naturalists collecting for them in all the chief islands for many years with unlimited means.

Give my kind love to mother, to whom I will write next time.—-Your affectionate brother, ALFRED R. WALLACE