THE GARDENS OF THE SUN: OR A NATURALIST'S JOURNAL ON THE MOUNTAINS AND IN THE FORESTS AND SWAMPS OF BORNEO AND THE SULU ARCHIPELAGO. By F. W. BURBIDGE, TRINITY COLLEGE BOTANICAL GARDENS, DUBLIN, AND FORMERLY OF THE ROYAL GARDENS, KEW. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS. LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 1880. I Dedicate this Work TO MY WIFE, BECAUSE WHILE I WORKED ABROAD SHE WAITED AT HOME. MOST OF US KNOW HOW EASY IT IS TO LABOUR-- ALL OF US KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO WAIT. PREFACE. This record of a time spent among the less well-known portions of Malaysia may be interesting to those whom the goddess of travel has wooed in vain, as perchance to some of those "birds of passage" to whom the islands and continents of the world are as well known as the church-spires and mile-stones of their own land. In the islands of the Malay archipelago--the Gardens of the Sun--Nature is ever beautiful, and man, although often strikingly primitive, is hospitable to the stranger, and not often vile. A voyage of a few weeks brings us to these beauty-spots of the Eastern Seas--to an "always-afternoon" kind of climate--since they are blessed with the heat and glory of eternal summer--to a place where winter is unknown--monsoon-swept islands oasis-like basking in a warm and shallow desert of sea. Warmed by perpetual sunshine, deluged by copious rains, and thrilled by electricity, they are really enormous conservatories of beautiful vegetation--great Zoological Gardens inhabited by rare birds and curious animals. In these sunny garden scenes man is the Adam of a modern Eden, primitive in habits and numerically insignificant; he has scarcely begun his battle with things inanimate, or his struggle for existence as it is known to us. At home we have man as in some sort the master of Nature, but in the Bornean forests Nature still reigns supreme. Here with us man wrests his sustenance from her--there she is lavish in the bestowal of gifts unsought.