Volume 1

Himalayan journals, or, notes of a naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia mountains, &c / by Joseph Dalton Hooker.

  • Joseph Dalton Hooker
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Himalayan journals, or, notes of a naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia mountains, &c / by Joseph Dalton Hooker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    92/468 (page 52)
    absorbing than its natural history was the circumstance of its having swallowed a child, that was ])laying in the water as its mother was washing her utensils in the river. The brute was hardly dead, much distended by the prey, and the mother was standing beside it. A very touching grouj) was this : the parent with her hands clasped in agony, unable to withdraw her eyes from the cursed reptile, which still clung to life with that tenacity for which its tribe are so conspicuous; beside these the two athletes leaned on the bloody bamboo staffs, with which they had all but despatched the animal. This poor woman earned a scanty maintenance by making catechu: inhabiting a little cottage, and having no property but two cattle to bring wood from the hills, and a very few household chattels; and how few of these they only know who have seen the meagre furniture of Danga hovels. Her husband cut the trees in the forest and dragged them to the hut, but at this time he was sick, and her only boy, her future stay, it was, whom the beast had devoured. This province is famous for the quantity of catechu its dry forests yield. The plant {Acacia) is a little thorny tree, erect, and bearing a rounded head of well remembered prickly branches. Its wood is yellow, with a dark brick- red heart, most profitable in January and useless in June (for yielding the extract). The Butea frondosa was abundantly in flower here, and a gorgeous sight. In mass the inflorescence resembles sheets of flame, and individually the flowers are eminently beautiful, the bright orange-red petals contrasting bril- liantly against the jet-black velyety calyx. The nest of the MegacUle (leaf-cutter bee) was in thousands in the cliffs, with Mayflies, Caddis-worms, spiders, and many predaceous V X