splay of Pandanaceae or Screw-pines. Some are like huge
branching candelabra, forty or fifty feet high, and bearing at the
end of each branch a tuft of immense sword-shaped leaves, six or eight
inches wide, and as many feet long. Others have a single unbranched
stem, six or seven feet high, the upper part clothed with the spirally
arranged leaves, and bearing a single terminal fruit ac large as a
swan's egg. Others of intermediate size have irregular clusters of rough
red fruits, and all have more or less spiny-edged leaves and ringed
stems. The young plants of the larger species have smooth glossy thick
leaves, sometimes ten feet long and eight inches wide, which are used
all over the Moluccas and New Guinea, to make "cocoyas" or sleeping
mats, which are often very prettily ornamented with coloured patterns.
Higher up on the bill is a forest of immense trees, among which those
producing the resin called dammar (Dammara sp.) are abundant. The
inhabitants of several small villages in Batchian are entirely engaged
in searching for this product, and making it into torches by pounding
it and filling it into tubes of palm leaves about a yard long, which
are the only lights used by many of the natives. Sometimes the dammar
accumulates in large masses of ten or twenty pounds weight, either
attached to the trunk, or found buried in the ground at the foot of the
trees. The most extraordinary trees of the forest are, however, a kind
of fig, the aerial roots of which form a pyramid near a hundred feet
high, terminating just where the tree branches out above, so that there
is no real trunk. This pyramid or cone is formed of roots of every size,
mostly descending in straight lines, but more or less obliquely-and so
crossing each other, and connected by cross branches, which grow from
one to another; as to form a dense and complicated network, to which
nothing but a photograph could do justice (see illustration at Vol. I.
page 130). The Kanary is also abundant in this forest, the nut of which
has a very agreeable flavour, and produces an excellent oil. The fleshy
outer covering of the nut is the favourite food of the great green
pigeons of these islands (Carpophaga, perspicillata), and their
hoarse copings and heavy flutterings among the branches can be almost
continually heard.

After ten days at Langundi, finding it impossible to get the bird I was
particularly in search of (the Nicobar pigeon, or a new species allied
to it), and f