I tried to learn about them when I came home, and found that there is in existence a large folio of manuscript of descriptions and specimens of plants collected by French fathers in this province; but as no one visits Kweichow there was no demand for such a work, and there is no hope of it being published. The collection is at the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens. It was the same with other things: the mountains often had the strangest forms, and I made careful drawings of their outlines. Photos were usually out of the question, as the mountains were too close; they rose up like walls all round us, and the light was always in the wrong quarter. On my return home I went cheerfully to learned societies with confident hope of slaking my thirst for knowledge, but alas! No books on _such_ an unknown part, the very name of course unknown. When my drawings had been duly inspected, the remark made was, “I must compliment you on your sketches, I have never seen mountains like that!” Was there a touch of irony in the remark? Truly Kweichow is a wonderful country and beautiful in the extreme, as the late Dr. Morrison (adviser to the Chinese Government) told me when I went to get his advice before starting. “You could not have chosen a more interesting part to travel in,” he said, “nor a more beautiful one”; and he had travelled in almost every part of China. It is full of different aboriginal races of whom very little is known, its flora is remarkably rich and varied, and its geology a continual surprise. The second day across the border we crossed a small plain from which rise a series of round low mounds, like pudding-basins, from the flat ricefields—an extraordinary contrast to the lofty, jagged mountains from which we had just descended. In the midst of it all was a curious tumbled heap of lava-like appearance, looking as if it had been ejected from the earth by some colossal earthworms. Sir Alexander Hosie says[21] that there is a parallel row of these mounds about ten miles to the south: they run east and west. In the ricefields I saw a brilliant kingfisher, hanging poised in mid-air in search of prey, while a heron stalked away at our approach.