At about 1000 feet above Punkabaree, the vegetation is very rich, and appears all the more so from the many turnings of the road, affording glorious prospects of the foreshortened tropical forests. The prevalent timber is gigantic, and scaled by climbing _Leguminosæ,_ as _Bauhinias_ and _Robinias,_ which sometimes sheath the trunks, or span the forest with huge cables, joining tree to tree. Their trunks are also clothed with parasitical Orchids, and still more beautifully with Pothos (_Scindapsus_), Peppers, _Gnetum,_ Vines, Convolvulus, and _Bignoniæ._ The beauty of the drapery of the Pothos-leaves is pre-eminent, whether for the graceful folds the foliage assumes, or for the liveliness of its colour. Of the more conspicuous smaller trees, the wild banana is the most abundant, its crown of very beautiful foliage contrasting with the smaller-leaved plants amongst which it nestles; next comes a screw-pine (_Pandanus_) with a straight stem and a tuft of leaves; each eight or ten feet long, waving on all sides. _Araliaceæ,_ with smooth or armed slender trunks, and _Mappa_-like _Euphorbiaceæ,_ spread their long petioles horizontally forth, each terminated with an ample leaf some feet in diameter. Bamboo abounds everywhere: its dense tufts of culms, 100 feet and upwards high, are as thick as a man’s thigh at the base. Twenty or thirty, species of ferns (including a tree-fern) were luxuriant and handsome. Foliaceous lichens and a few mosses appeared at 2000 feet. Such is the vegetation of the roads through the tropical forests of the Outer-Himalaya. At about 4000 feet the road crossed a saddle, and ran along the narrow crest of a hill, the top of that facing the plains of India, and over which is the way to the interior ranges, amongst which Dorjiling is placed, still twenty-five miles off. A little below this a great change had taken place in the vegetation, marked, first, by the appearance of a very English-looking bramble, which, however, by way of proving its foreign origin, bore a very good yellow fruit, called here the “yellow raspberry.” Scattered oaks, of a noble species, with large lamellated cups and magnificent foliage, succeeded; and along the ridge of the mountain to Kursiong (a dawk bungalow at about 4,800 feet), the change in the flora was complete. The spring of this region and elevation most vividly recalled that of England. The oak flowering, the birch bursting into leaf, the violet, _Chrysosplenium, Stellaria_ and _Arum, Vaccinium,_ wild strawberry, maple, geranium, bramble. A colder wind blew here: mosses and lichens carpeted the banks and roadsides: the birds and insects were very different from those below; and everything proclaimed the marked change in elevation, and not only in this, but in season, for I had left the winter of the tropics and here encountered the spring of the temperate zone.