"I am in a difficulty; I do not know what to show you. We have some most curious plants in the garden, but there is nothing remarkable about them externally. I suppose you want something with a _cachet_ for the public?" I said he was quite right in his supposition. What I wanted was something of interest from a picturesque point of view to the general public. "There," he said, pointing to a tall tree with a growth and foliage of no distinct character, "is a strychnine tree; from the berries of that tree we get nux vomica; but if you drew that, they would say, 'Why, it is an apple-tree; it is not worth going to the tropics to see that.'" By this time we had almost reached the banks of the Tjiliwong, and again turning to the right, where grew the pandans, "There," he said, "is a tree with aërial roots. It comes from the Nicobar Islands, just north-west of Sumatra. I think it is about twenty-eight feet in height. No, the roots do not contribute to its nourishment; they are useless but very curious." From the pandans we passed to the palms. First we noticed a specimen of comparatively low growth, with its leaves springing from the ground like the leaves of a primrose--_Ladoicea Sechellarum_. It bore, I was told, the largest fruit and the largest leaves of any known tree, the former being two, and the latter ten, feet in diameter. "Unfortunately, there is no fruit on it," said Dr. Treub, "but you can see _that_ in any museum. You see, the stems of the leaves are as hard as iron." Indeed, they gave quite a metallic ring as he drove the ferrule of his walking stick against them. A few steps further brought us to a tree which Dr. Treub said had no special characteristics, but was a perfect natural specimen of the palm family. It stood about forty feet in height, and was furnished with foliage which hung gracefully suspended from a straight tapering stem. Then at the next corner, where its beauty showed to advantage, we came upon a group of red-stemmed palms from the little island of Banka. A fortnight later I was anchored off Mentok, the capital of that island, in a Dutch mail boat; but at this time I had no knowledge of the _habitat_ of this fair tree--nor, indeed, had I seen it before, although a few weeks afterwards I found two fine specimens growing on either side of the entrance of a private house at Singapore. It needs an expert to describe so rare a combination of brilliant colours and graceful form. Mr. Forbes, the naturalist, in his account of his "Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago," tells how he passed down through "plots of amaryllideæ, iris, and other water-loving plants" in this quarter of the garden; and how he found the "glory" of "the richest _palmetum_ in the world--the _Cyrtostachys renda_, whose long bright scarlet leaf-sheaths and flower-spathes, and its red fruit and deep yellow inflorescence hanging side by side, at once arrest the eye."