Many travellers complain of the annoyance caused to them by leeches. Legions of these pests abound in the water-courses and dense jungles of the Sikkim, and though their bite is painless, it is followed by considerable effusion of blood. "They puncture through thick worsted stockings, and even trousers; and when full roll in the form of a little soft ball into the bottom of the shoe, where their presence is hardly felt in walking." A thousand feet higher, above the bungalow of Punkabaree, the vegetation is very rich, the prevalent timber being of enormous size, "and scaled by climbing _Leguminosae_, as _Bauhinias_ and _Robinias_, which sometimes sheathe the trunks or span the forest with huge cables, joining tree to tree." Their trunks are also clothed with orchids; and still more beautifully with pothos, peppers, vines, and convolvuli. "The beauty of the drapery of the pothos leaves (_Scindapsus_) is pre-eminent, whether for the graceful folds the foliage assumes or for the liveliness of its color. 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 screwpine (_Pandanus_) with a straight stem and a tuft of leaves, each eight or ten feet long, waving on all sides. _Araliaceae_, with smooth or armed slender trunks, and _Mappa_-like _Euphorbiaceae_ 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 upward 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 2,000 feet. Such is the vegetation of the roads through the tropical forests of Outer Himalaya." As we ascend about 2,000 feet higher, we find many plants of the temperate zone mingling with the tropical vegetation, amongst which "a very English-looking bramble," bearing a good yellow fruit, is the first to mark the change; next, mighty oaks with large lamellated cups and magnificent foliage succeed, till along the ridge of the mountain to Kursiong, at an elevation of about 4,800 feet, the change in the flora is complete. Here the vegetation recalls to mind home impressions: "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 the vegetation." And yet even at this elevation we meet with forms of tropical plants, "pothos, bananas, palms, figs, pepper, numbers of epiphytal orchids, and similar genuine tropical genera."