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NEW CRITICAL NOSTALGIA
Sara Guyer and Brian McGrath, series editors
Lit Z embraces models of criticism uncontained by
conventional notions of history, periodicity, and culture,
and committed to the work of reading. Books in the series
may seem untimely, anachronistic, or out of touch with
contemporary trends because they have arrived too early or too
late. Lit Z creates a space for books that exceed and challenge
the tendencies of our field and in doing so reflect on the
concerns of literary studies here and abroad.
At least since Friedrich Schlegel, thinking that affirms
literature’s own untimeliness has been named romanticism.
Recalling this history, Lit Z exemplifies the survival of
romanticism as a mode of contemporary criticism, as well
as forms of contemporary criticism that demonstrate the
unfulfilled possibilities of romanticism. Whether or not they
focus on the romantic period, books in this series epitomize
romanticism as a way of thinking that compels another relation
to the present. Lit Z is the first book series to take seriously this
capacious sense of romanticism.
In 1977, Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman, two scholars
of romanticism, team- taught a course called Literature Z that
aimed to make an intervention into the fundamentals of literary
study. Hartman and de Man invited students to read a series of
increasingly difficult texts and through attention to language
and rhetoric compelled them to encounter “the bewildering
variety of ways such texts could be read.” The series’
conceptual resonances with that class register the importance
of recollection, reinvention, and reading to contemporary
criticism. Its books explore the creative potential of reading’s
untimeliness and history’s enigmatic force.
NEW CRITICAL NOSTALGIA

Romantic Lyric and the Crisis of Academic Life

Christopher Rovee

Fordham University Press

New York 2024
Copyright © 2024 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical,
photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews,
without the prior permission of the publisher.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs
for external or third- party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats.
Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at https://catalog

.loc.gov.

Printed in the United States of America

26 25 24 5 4 3 2 1

First edition
for Giovanna
and in memory of Remo Ceserani
Contents

Introduction: Our Elegiac Professionalism 1

1 Ransom’s Melancholy
(Reading Wordsworth in Gambier, Ohio) 23
2 Shelley’s Immaturity 52
3 Brooks and the Collegiate Public,
Reading Keats Together 85
4 The Case of Byron 110
5 The Emergence of Josephine Miles
(Reading Wordsworth in Berkeley, California) 135
Epilogue: The Fields of Learning 177

Acknowledgments 193
Notes 197
Index 253
When we go out into the fields of learning
We go by a rough route
Marked by colossal statues, Frankenstein’s
Monsters, AMPAC and the 704,
AARDVARK, and deoxyribonucleic acid.
They guard the way.
Headless they nod, wink eyeless,
Thoughtless compute, not heartless,
For they figure us, they figure
Our next turning.
They are reading the book to be written.
As we start out
At first daylight into the fields, they are saying,
Starting out.
—Josephine Miles, “Fields of Learning”
Introduction:
Our Elegiac Professionalism

A vague sense of loss has long permeated the study of literature.1 Whether
explicitly named as a “longing for the lost unities of bygone forms” or merely
implied in a wistful terminology that, to cite a typical example, recalls the late
1950s as “the heroic age of Spenser studies,” this nostalgic strain suffuses our
disciplinary vocabulary.2 It’s not necessarily a new nostalgia—two wellsprings
of modern literary study, philology and New Criticism, were underwritten
by it after all—but it’s an intensifying nostalgia, this widespread belief “that
something has gone missing” from our work, that “the discipline, as currently
configured, is missing something that it once had.”3 The last two decades have
seen calls for assorted disciplinary “returns”—to philology, to aesthetics, to
the common reader, to the archive, to the classroom, to the text—and the
range of practices associated with the twenty- first century’s “method wars”
often attest to a similar desire to reclaim something that’s slipped beyond our
shared professional grasp.4
This is the elegiac sense conveyed in my book’s title, by which I don’t
mean a nostalgia for the New Criticism (though in some cases it manifests that
way) but rather a nostalgia for something indeterminate which the New
Criticism is regularly identified with, namely the fleeting cohesiveness and
relevance that our histories tend to associate with the postwar era of the
1940s and ’50s. Nor do I mean “nostalgia” only in a regressive sense. The
term may be shorthand for a false consciousness that basks in dreams of yes-
teryear (“Nostalgia tells it like it wasn’t,” in David Lowenthal’s much- quoted
phrase), but it can also register protest against an unjust present and signal
forward- looking engagement with the past. Nostalgia also evokes desires that
are endemic to literary study and inextricable from the experiences of dis-
location and compulsive mobility that define life in the modern university.5
All of these aspects feature in Edward Said’s mournful (yet deeply political)
1982 observation that “there has been a historical erosion in the role of letters
2 Introduction

since the New Criticism”—where Said employs “New Criticism” less to

denote a methodology than a lost Eden, in which literature was both the
spiritual center of academic life and capable of “interference” in “the everyday
world.”6 The image that he summons may be pastoral—the sun casting its
light through autumn leaves into the window of a book- lined seminar room,
among students in earnest discussion around a heavy wood table—but it is
potent. It is the image of a time when literary criticism, the humanities, and
the university all seemed on a surer footing vis-à- vis society at large; when it
could be taken for granted that the study of books played a role in public life.
The story of this “golden age of robust confidence and prestige” is widely
familiar.7 After World War II, we’re told, the humanities took on the re-
sponsibility of developing the nation’s leaders, cultivating the values that
the United States had defended in the war and stabilizing what the Harvard
“Redbook” Committee in 1945 called “a centrifugal culture in extreme need
of unifying forces.” In the face of a perennially modern fear “of losing touch
with the human past and therefore with each other,” the literature classroom
assumed a central place in the national imaginary, uniting a new generation
around shared texts and a common cultural heritage.8 “College English”
became a near- mythic space of socialization, where adolescent students grew
up under the tutelage of a progressive and energized professoriate, honing
their close- reading skills within an intimate classroom community whose
members attended, all at once, to the same thing. The shared study of books,
in this idyllic image, compensated for the disunity seemingly incarnated in
the period’s modernized large universities with their newly disparate student
bodies. For a tantalizingly brief space of time, while the American university
benefited from a massive infusion of state and federal funds for scientific
research, its liberal core remained essentially intact, the government’s largesse
benefiting what would still be, for a few years longer, a humanities- centered
institution.9 This fleeting happenstance made possible an argument which
no generation of American academics has been able to make since: that the
humanities, as crystallized in the practices of literary study, bore a recognized
social value. Our New Critical nostalgia looks longingly toward this transient
period when it was possible to articulate and believe in such a claim—a
period that is metonymically associated, in the historical imagination, with
the close- reading practices of the American New Criticism.
I don’t wish to hypostatize this optimistic view of mid- century literary
study. Whether things were this way or not, whether there really is something
particular that’s gone missing and is the source of our nostalgia, this is a story
that’s taken hold. There are plenty of contemporary anecdotes to support it,
and there is just as much contemporary worry, expressed under titles like
“Can the Study of Literature Be Revived?,” to counter it.10 There is also, we
 Introduction 3

know too well, a popular and conservative fixation on this story of literary
study’s bygone eminence, fed by a facile media caricature that points to
politicization and over- specialization as the reasons for our falling- off . A
little more than a decade ago, a characteristic requiem in The American Scholar,
titled “The Decline of the English Department,” lamented the replacement
of “books themselves” by “a scattered array of secondary considerations
(identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture).”11 But
this fantasy of a simpler, apolitical, and pre- specialized time is of course
amnesiac. The 1950s classroom was not some Rousseauvian idyll where
students “naturally” gravitated toward imagery and away from politics, and
even at the height of New Critical sway, there was no clear consensus about
the disciplinary object of literary study; formalist close reading existed and
thrived in a vital dialectic with varieties of criticism, historicism, and recep-
tion study. As for the supposed salad days of postwar relevance, literary study
(and humanistic study in general) has never not struggled for academic and
cultural legitimacy. The nineteenth- century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt
identified crisis as the humanities’ permanent condition, noting the struggle
of sixteenth- century “poet- scholars” to explain their social purposes.12 Even
if we accept the hypothesis of a postwar boom, it is easy to lose sight of how
fragile and fleeting such a moment would have been.
The most obvious sign of interest in an older period’s practices of literary
study is the curiosity that has lately been swirling around close reading. No
disciplinary concept has made quite so strong a return in recent years, whether
in varieties of the new aestheticism, or in the Common Core curriculum,
or in the frequency with which critics have weighed the merits of close
reading against alternatives ranging from surface reading to distant reading
to hyper- reading.13 “Reflecting on how we read has become a metacritical
genre unto itself,” writes Elaine Auyoung, and a glance at JSTOR shows
that the phrase “close reading” soars in our critical literature after 1995—an
admittedly imprecise measure, but one that at least marks a distinct phase in
the history of criticism, with close reading more and more at the center of
the discipline’s collective thought.14 It is not surprising that interest in a read-
ing practice which approached poems as self- sufficient objects would have
revived at the very moment when academia was being forced into economic
self- sufficiency (the early 1990s representing, as Mary Poovey notes, a key
moment for the public divestment from higher education).15 Since then, there
have been repeated attempts to turn up the forgotten origins of this “sacred
icon of literary studies.”16 Close reading’s inception has been found in Lon-
don extension schools and in Skinnerian behaviorism, in British aestheticism
and in Southern agrarianism; it’s been sourced to Nashville (home to the
Fugitive poets), Baton Rouge (birthplace of Understanding Poetry), Cambridge
4 Introduction

(practical criticism), New Haven (Yale- School formalism), Chicago (neo-

Aristotelianism), Paris (explication de texte), St. Petersburg (OPOYAZ). It’s
sprung up in so many places that the pursuit has a kind of Whac- A- Mole
quality about it—tracked down to one place only to pop up in another.17
This resurgent interest in the origins of close reading is not a sign that
close reading has gone missing in itself. It obviously has not. Rather, it is a
sign of close reading’s imaginary relation to something that has gone missing:
a confidence—underwritten by political culture and enabled by asynchro-
nous funding streams, and thus possible only in the fleeting and contradictory
circumstances of the postwar academy—that what happens in college liter-
ature classrooms and in the pages of academic periodicals is valued by the
culture at large.
Dispensing with the myth of a single point of origination for close reading
and the professionalism it instantiates, New Critical Nostalgia instead pursues
a period of cultivation, establishment, and dissemination between the 1930s
and the 1960s. I put gentle and corrective pressure on the received view of
these decades by historicizing the institutional changes and critical exchanges
out of which our current practices and predicaments grew. I refract all of this
through the prism of the romantic lyric’s reception, an integral but much-
caricatured feature of the disciplinary past. More often talked about than
read, New Critical treatments of romanticism have mainly been known by
their reputation for hostility. But they are more than this; they are quirky and
unpredictable, with a compelling strangeness that derives from the spectacle
of America’s most ambivalently nostalgic critics taking on Britain’s most ex-
plicitly nostalgic body of literature. In these frequently cathectic engagements
with the romantic lyric, the question of nostalgia is overdetermined in ways
that would prove consequential for the later development of criticism.
By turning the narrative of romantic studies toward this earlier period of
reaction, and away from the presumptive core of romanticism’s disciplinary
history—the rehabilitative phase of the 1950s and ’60s and the deconstructive
apotheosis of the 1970s—New Critical Nostalgia enables a different perception
of the relationship between the field of romantic lyric and the discipline of
literary studies. For one thing, it reveals the dislocation of romanticism from
its curricular perch in the mid- twentieth century, which is typically seen as a
causal feature in the rise of the modern field, as more a rhetorical feature of
our professional self- understanding than a fact of disciplinary history. To say
so is not to downplay the very real antagonism expressed toward romanticism
at the time (an antagonism that the following chapters will amply document),
but rather to interrogate its causes and effects. The period’s vaunted anti-
romanticism is traditionally chalked up to a basic clash of worldviews, as was
 Introduction 5

summarized even by the MLA’s research guide to romantic studies, published

at the end of New Critical hegemony in the early 1970s:
The trouble with the Romantics was [seen by New Critics as] their ability
to detect intimations of immortality or to create myths which enabled them
to wander in gladness. The New Critics spoke for a generation which was
world- weary, materialistic, and skeptical; which regarded the human situation as
a hopelessly perplexing existence in a barren, wasted land; and which despised
any literature that envisages it otherwise. Hence they asserted that Romantic lit-
erature as a whole (including Shakespeare) is too emotional, too soft (not “dry,
hard, and classical”), too hopeful that the good in man’s nature may overcome
the evil, too desirous of simplifying human experience into intelligible design,
too credulous in sensing a harmony in the apparent discords of the universe,
and, above all, too certain that Imagination, cooperating with Reason, can
reveal such truths through the beautiful.18

Irreconcilable differences of sensibility probably do inform some anti- romantic

writing of the early twentieth century, though another way of understanding
the phenomenon has been to identify an originary moment or epochal turn
within the institutional adolescence of the discipline. The historical scholar
Carl Woodring, for instance, recalled anti- romanticism as taking root at the
1947 MLA Convention in Detroit, where “New Critics spoke in the large
section meetings, and the teaching of English was transformed as if by fiat.”
According to Woodring, this episode turned intellectual aversion into insti-
tutional contagion, with the assault on romanticism “spread[ing] from T. E.
Hulme and the new humanists to the classroom, through textbooks prepared
by the new critics or by eager disciples.”19 The claim is compelling— that
American New Critics transformed New Humanist antagonism into a field-
wide phenomenon rooted in teaching practices—and as I discuss in Chapter
2, some of the readings in Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s popular
classroom textbook of the time, Understanding Poetry, did indeed codify anti-
romantic sentiment. But the notion that fields are “transformed by fiat” is
an example of the exaggeration that too often mars an anecdotal history,
preventing clear understanding of the complex development of the discipline
in its relation to one of its core subjects.
While the rhetoric of disparagement invites such exaggeration, another
way to read that rhetoric is as a symptom of countervailing investments. The
English poet- critic Hulme’s lurid and foundational assault on romanticism as
“spilt religion,” defined by its “sloppiness,” its “moaning or whining,” and its
drug- like addictiveness, may have laid the groundwork for later denigration of
romanticism by ethical and aesthetic critics, but it also established a bombastic
6 Introduction

tone that was sometimes more theatrical than critical.20 For all their avowed
and vigorous anti- romanticism, critics like Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and
W. K. Wimsatt cared intensely about romanticism, and to closely attend to
their writing about it is to encounter an affective involvement that runs far
deeper than our histories of literary criticism typically acknowledge. They
produced influential readings of romantic poems, took intellectual inspiration
from romantic literary theory, and shared with the leading romantic writers
both an interest in the language of everyday life and a powerful anti- industrial
and anti- capitalist bent. Even as New Critics argued for the decentraliza-
tion of romanticism in the curriculum, they framed the literary field as, in
some sense, a response to romantic ideas. In keeping with a historical pattern
wherein romanticism was consistently seen, in James Chandler’s words, “as
the prestige field of methodological advancement,” the romantic lyric rode
shotgun with the New Criticism as the modern discipline developed its
initial vital sense of itself.21
At the same time, American New Critics habitually tamped down their
involvement with romanticism, both willfully and defensively. As students,
many had been dazzled by the romantics, suggesting that the achievement
of critical maturity demanded the surmounting of early literary passions.
T. S. Eliot, a key influence on New Critics, described the “invasion of [his]
adolescent self ” by Shelley, which he called “a kind of daemonic posses-
sion.”22 Soon after, Brooks experienced his own boyish enthrallment by the
romantics, which he claims to have conquered by the end of college: “In my
own senior year, I at last began to grow up.”23 Austin Warren, arguably the
most moderate and representative of the New Critics, described a similar
process of adolescent fascination and recuperation. A “youthful Shelley and
Keats man,” Warren remembered being whipped into “confusion” by his
undergraduate romanticism class at Harvard with Irving Babbitt. Having an-
ticipated appreciative lectures on poets he considered as “spirits like myself,”
Warren instead “experienced conversion”—a word used by many others
of his generation to describe their intellectual maturation away from the
romantics. “I burned what once I had adored,” he later reminisced; “Once
so proud of my effervescent ‘enthusiasm,’ I grew so ashamed of the thing
and name that to this day I cannot write the word without encasing it in
prophylactic quotes.” Warren’s metaphor of “prophylactic quotes” suggests
the severity of the threat posed to his scholarly identity by a “sheer romanti-
cism” that he learned to repress.24 For critics in like remission, an exaggerated
anti- romanticism seems almost to operate as a defense against backsliding.
To detach from romanticism’s perceived immaturity and from their own
remembered “enthusiasm” for it, it appears, is to establish and preserve an
 Introduction 7

objectivity of judgment, keeping those identifications that Eliot associated

with the “intense period before maturity” at a safe distance from the mature
critical self.25
This pattern—youthful enthrallment giving way to critical maturity, and
grown-up critics on guard against their “burning memories” of romantic
poetry—shaped mid- century attitudes toward the romantic lyric. Re-
peatedly, by ethical and aesthetic critics alike, romanticism was defined as
a psychopathological condition.26 When Eliot says that “the only cure for
Romanticism is to analyze it,” or when Ransom states that “a romantic
period testifies to a large-scale failure of adaptation,” they are framing it in
terms of the regressive and dangerous desires traditionally associated with
a pathological nostalgia.27 “The poetry I am disparaging is a heart’s- desire
poetry,” Ransom explained, which “denies the real world by idealizing it:
the act of a sick mind.”28 In this analogy, romanticism is unfitness, a form of
arrested development or state of enervation in which the hardness and critical
capacity required for modern life and privileged in the modern university
are lacking. “[T]he awful result of romanticism is that, accustomed to this
strange light, you can never live without it,” writes Hulme; “Its effect on you
is that of a drug.”29
Paradoxically, however, the agrarian sensibility that gave rise to a major
branch of the New Criticism was nothing if not nostalgic and roman-
tic. As Gerald Graff puts it, a “condition of becoming institutionalized”
in the modern American university was that the New Criticism had to
“sever its ties with the social and cultural criticism” of its “first generation”
practitioners— had, in other words, to guard against becoming defined by
their virulent longing for an idealized past.30 Such, perhaps, is one explanation
for the American New Critics’ Janus- faced attitude toward romanticism—
sometimes admiring and sympathetic, sometimes dismissive and hostile. The
strategic dislocation of romanticism from its place atop the mainstream canon
might be seen as self- protective, a way to defend against an identification of
literary study as undisciplined, merely nostalgic, while simultaneously avoid-
ing the opposite extreme of a hard- scientific model of study.

The Romantic Crisis Narrative

The intense repudiation of romanticism by the New Critics may be a
conventional plot- point of disciplinary history, but romantic scholars have
played their own meaningful role in generating and reproducing the narra-
tive. Harold Bloom in a 1990 New York magazine feature called the New
Criticism “a neo- Christian, neo- Catholic attempt to destroy Romanticism,”
8 Introduction

and while this may have been comic hyperbole, it fit a longstanding pattern
of romanticists fretting what they perceived as an existential threat to the
field.31 In the immediate postwar years the worry centered on Shelley, target
of the most extravagant critiques. Richard Fogle wrote in agitation that
the “reputations of all the English Romantic poets” had been “vigorously
attacked,” with the New Critics “succeed[ing] in damaging Shelley seriously
in the minds even of intelligent readers.”32 Frederick Pottle, Bloom’s usually
even- keeled supervisor at Yale, similarly waxed alarmist: “within fifty years
practically everybody will be saying about Shelley what the New Critics are
saying now. The disesteem of Shelley is going to become general, and it may
continue for a century or more.”33
Theatrical distress is characteristic of a field whose structural signature is
crisis.34 Romanticism, as an intellectual and thematic rubric rather than a his-
torical one—“the period metaphor that both stabilizes and disrupts the very
concept of period metaphors”—is uniquely vulnerable to the efficiency-
driven business model of the modern university.35 Though historically central
to the conceptualization of literature as a field, with a foot in two separate
centuries it is assimilable on either side, with the result that jobs in romantic
studies are now typically absorbed in the more economical categories of a
“long eighteenth” or “long nineteenth” century.36 But there are important
differences between English’s (and by extension romanticism’s) “market
retreat,” an intricate economic event of the late twentieth century that has
only worsened since then, and the storied decline of romanticism in the
wartime and postwar era, which was largely an invented crisis.37 Romantic
studies was not, to be clear, a field in decline at mid- century. It did, however,
come to figure decline around that time—and soon enough, in keeping
with the pattern familiar to any reader of The Prelude, to figure recovery
as well.
Romanticism’s founding myth of crisis- and- resurgence is almost too
obvious to mention, being so dear to the field’s self- understanding, but it is
worth pausing over this myth in conjunction with the broader emergence
of literary study. “Rehabilitation,” “rebirth,” and “revival” are the familiar
medical tropes: Aidan Day claims M. H. Abrams as “arguably the most im-
portant single voice in the post–Second World War critical rehabilitation
of Romanticism”; Thomas McFarland invokes an “astonishing rebirth of
romantic attitudes” and dates “the new flowing of romantic currents” to “the
early 1950s”; James Chandler points to Abrams, Bloom, and Frye as primary
vectors in “the American revival of Romanticism after the debilitating cri-
tiques of humanist ideologues like Irving Babbitt and new critics like T. S.
Eliot.”38 Abrams’s subsequent formulation of the “Greater Romantic Lyric,”
 Introduction 9

a seminal account of the lyric pattern of crisis and recovery, resonates with
the perceived trajectory of the field as a whole.39 A narrative of recovery,
though, presumes prior debilitation: that the field of romanticism had suf-
fered a diminishment of legitimacy, had been weakened, impaired, enfeebled.
This is the story we tell, and it was the story told at the time.
Yet to be embattled is not to be debilitated, and if questions of legitimacy
dogged romanticists, this was partly in consequence of the field’s undeniable
centrality in the debates taking place at the time. In all my archival research,
I have yet to come across a single expression of concern, however fleeting or
facetious, about the academic job market for romanticism at mid- century. A
series of scholarly reminiscences published in Studies in Romanticism in 1981
under the title “How It Was,” on the contrary, paints a picture of relative (if
paradoxical) health—at least for the white, male scholars surveyed for the
issue.The great Keatsian Jack Stillinger recalls abundant positions available for
romanticists, despite Wordsworth being “very little taught,” Shelley “men-
tioned only to be ridiculed,” and Blake “practically unheard- of.” By the time
he began traveling for on- campus interviews, “the offers were piling up” for
his Harvard grad school colleagues, all of whom would, “before the end of the
year, get good jobs.” Herbert Lindenberger, author of On Wordsworth’s Prelude
in 1963, recalls his graduation year of 1954 as “a bad job market,” though it
was not bad enough to prevent his becoming “decently ensconced at the
University of California’s brand- new campus at Riverside.” The Coleridgean
Thomas McFarland, meanwhile, shares in the same issue a self- aggrandizing
and self- mythologizing recollection: blowing up interviews and opportunities
right and left, resigning from his first job “in a romantic frenzy,” announcing
in an interview for his next job that he didn’t “believe in teaching hard,”
refusing yet another position for reasons so trivial he can’t even remember
them, and finally resigning the next position he got “in another romantic
paroxysm, this time taking half the department with me.”40 It is no stretch to
say that young female scholars of the time could never have survived profes-
sionally had they played so lightly with “frenzy” or with “paroxysms.” A tale
such as McFarland’s underscores the special privilege informing these earlier
iterations of the academic job search, which barely merits the term “market.”
It might even be said that romanticism in the middle of the twentieth
century thrived as never before, assuming an integral role in contemporary
skirmishes over the future of literary study. Crisis may have been (and may
still be) the field’s byword, but this is part- and- parcel of what Eric Lindstrom
remarks as its “centrality to twentieth- century methodological change.”41
Whether this centrality will define romanticism’s position in post- liberal,
mid- twenty- first- century academia remains an open question. Orrin Wang
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 Continuing in the way that followed this crooked stream, I
occasionally beheld the high top of Mount Klabat before me. Several
large butterflies flitted to and fro, their rich, velvety blue and green
colors seeming almost too bright to be real. At the eighth paal we
came to the native village Sawangan, and the chief showed me the
burial-place of his people previous to the arrival of Europeans. Most
of the monuments consist of three separate stones placed one on
another. The lowest is square or oblong, and partly buried in the
earth. Its upper surface has been squared off that the second might
rest on it more firmly. This is a rectangular-parallelopipedon, one or
two feet wide and two-thirds as thick, and from two to three feet high.
It is placed on end on the first stone. In its upper end a deep hole
has been made, and in this the body of the deceased is placed. It
was covered by the third stone of a triangular form when viewed at
the end, and made to represent that part of a house above the
eaves. It projects a little beyond the perpendicular stone beneath it.
On the sides of the roof rude figures of men, women, and children
were carved, all with the knees drawn up against the chin and
clasped by the arms, the hands being locked together in front below
the knees. In many of these the faces of the figures were flat, and
holes and lines were cut representing the eyes, nose, and mouth; in
others rude busts were placed on the eaves. This burial-place
contains the finest monuments of olden times now existing in the
Minahassa. Others can be seen at Tomohon, and especially at
Kakas, but they are not as highly ornamented as these. At Kakas
they are mostly composed of but two stones, one long one set
upright in the ground, and another placed over this as a cover to the
hole containing the body. At each of these places they are entirely
neglected, and many of the images here have already fallen or been
broken off. Noticing that a very good one was loose and ready to fall,
I remarked to the chief that, if I did not take it, it would certainly soon
be lost, and, before he had time to give his assent, I had it under my
arm. The missionary at Langowan informed me that originally these
graves were beset with such obscene ornaments that one of the
Residents felt it his duty to order that they should all be broken off.
This fact, and the rude form of the images, led me to think that they
ought to be classed with the remarkable temple found near Dorey,
on the north coast of New Guinea, and with the nude statues used
by the Battas to ornament the graves of their deceased friends.

THE BAMBOO.

When the Portuguese first arrived in the Moluccas, this region was
tributary to the prince of Ternate. All the natives were heathen then,
and many of them yet retain the superstitious belief of their
ancestors. Mohammedanism had not gained a foothold among them,
nor has it since, and the only Mohammedans now in the land are the
immigrants at Menado, who have come from other parts of the
archipelago, and a few natives banished from Java. Even as late as
1833, but little more than thirty years ago, Pietermaat, who was then
Resident, in his official report, says of these people: “They are wholly
ignorant of reading, writing, and arithmetic. They reckon by means of
notches in a piece of bamboo, or by knots made in a cord.” Formerly
they were guilty of practising the bloody custom of cutting off human
heads at every great celebration, and the missionary at Langowan
showed me a rude drawing of one of their principal feasts, made for
him by one of the natives themselves. In front of a house where the
chief was supposed to reside, was a short, circular paling of
bamboos placed upright, the upper ends of all were sharpened, and
on each was stuck a human head. Between thirty and forty of these
heads were represented as having been taken off for this single
festive occasion, and the missionary regarded the drawing as no
exaggeration, from what he knew of their bloody rites.
The remarkable quantities of coffee, cocoa-nuts, and other articles
yearly exported from the Minahassa show that a wonderful change
has come over this land, even since 1833; and the question at once
arises, What is it that has transferred these people from barbarism to
civilization? The answer and the only answer is, Christianity and
education. The Bible, in the hands of the missionaries, has been the
chief cause that has induced these people to lay aside their bloody
rites. As soon as a few natives had been taught to read and write,
they were employed as teachers, and schools were established from
place to place, and from these centres a spirit of industry and self-
respect has diffused itself among the people and supplanted in a
great measure their previous predisposition to idleness and self-
neglect. In 1840, seven years after Pietermaat gave the description
of these people mentioned above, the number of Christians
compared to that of heathen was as one to sixteen, now it is about
as two to five; and exactly as this ratio continues to increase, in the
same degree will the prosperity of this land become greater.
 The rocks seen on this journey through the Minahassa, as noted
above, are trachytic lavas, volcanic sand and ashes, pumice-stone,
and conglomerates composed of these materials and clay formed by
their decomposition. They all appear to be of a late formation, and,
as Dr. Bleeker remarks, the Minahassa seems to be only a recent
prolongation of the older sedimentary rocks in the residency of
Gorontalo. In this small part of the peninsula, there are no less than
eleven volcanoes. North of Menado is a chain of volcanic islands,
which form a prolongation of this peninsula. On the island Siao there
is an active volcano. North of it is the large island of Sangir.
According to Valentyn, the highest mountain on the island underwent
an eruption in December, 1711. A great quantity of ashes and lava
was ejected, and the air was so heated for some distance around,
that many of the natives lost their lives. North of the Sangir islands
are the Talaut group. These are the most northern islands under the
Dutch, and the boundary of their possessions in this part of the
archipelago.
The steamer Menado, on which I had previously taken passage
from Batavia all the way to Amboina, now arrived at Kema. She had
brought my collection from Amboina, Buru, and Ternate, and I was
ready to return to Java, for some months had passed since I
accomplished the object of my journey to the Spice Islands, and
during that time I had travelled many hundred miles and had reached
several regions which I had not dared to expect to see, even when I
left Batavia. A whale-ship from New Bedford was also in the road,
and when I visited her and heard every one, even the cabin-boy,
speaking English, it seemed almost as strange as it did to hear
nothing but Malay and Dutch when I first arrived in Java. Many
whales are usually found east of the Sangir Islands, and north of
Gilolo and New Guinea.
January 10th.—At noon steamed out of the bay of Kema and
down the eastern coast of Celebes for Macassar. When the sun was
setting, we were just off Tanjong Flasco, which forms the northern
limit of the bay of Gorontalo or Tomini. As the sun sank behind the
end of this high promontory, its jagged outline received a broad
margin of gold. Bands of strati stretched across the sky from north to
south and successively changed from gold to a bright crimson, and
then to a deep, dark red as the sunlight faded. All this bright coloring
of the sky was repeated in the sea, and the air between them
assumed a rich, scintillating appearance, as if filled with millions of
minute crystals of gold.
The controleur, on board, who travelled with me from Langowan,
has been farther into the interior, south of Gorontalo, than any
foreigner previously. He found the whole country divided up among
many petty tribes, who are waging a continual warfare with each
other; and the immediate object of his dangerous journey was to
conciliate two powerful tribes near the borders of the territory which
the Dutch claim as being under their command. He found that all
these people are excessively addicted to the use of opium, which is
brought from Singapore to the western coast, near Palos, by
Mandharese and Macassars.
The dress of the people consists of a sarong, made from the inner
layers of the bark of a tree. They have large parangs, and value
them in proportion to the number and minuteness of the damascene
lines on their blades. Twenty guilders is a common price for them.
The controleur gave me a very fine one, which was remarkably well
tempered. The most valuable export from this bay is gold, which is
found in great quantities, at least over the whole northern peninsula,
from the Minahassa south to the isthmus of Palos. The amount
exported is not known, for, though the Dutch Government has a
contract with the princes to deliver all the gold obtained in their
territory to it at a certain rate, they are offered a much higher price by
the Bugis, and consequently sell it to them. No extensive survey has
yet been made in this territory, by the mining engineers employed by
the government, and the extent and richness of these mines are
therefore wholly matters of the most uncertain speculation. The fact,
however, that gold was carried from this region before the arrival of
Europeans, more than three hundred and forty years ago, and that
the amount now exported appears to be larger than it was then,
indicates that the supply must be very great. The government has
not yet granted to private individuals the privilege of importing
machinery and laborers, and proving whether or not mining can be
carried on profitably on a large scale. A fragment of rock from this
region was shown me at Kema by a gentleman, who said he knew
where there were large quantities of it; and that specimen certainly
was very rich in the precious metal. Gold is also found in the
southwestern peninsula of Celebes, south of Macassar. The
geological age of these auriferous rocks is not known, but I was
assured that, back of Gorontalo, an outcropping of granite had been
seen. Buffaloes and horses are plenty and cheap at Gorontalo, and
many are sent by sea to the Minahassa. The horses are very fine,
and from the earliest times the Bugis have been accustomed to buy
and kill them to eat, having learned that such flesh is a most
delectable food, centuries before this was ascertained by the
enlightened Parisians.
January 11th.—Last night and to-day the sea has been smooth,
almost as smooth as glass, while we know that on the opposite or
western side of Celebes there has been one continuous storm. This
is why we have come down the eastern side of the island. Here the
seasons on the east and west coasts alternate, as we have already
noticed in Ceram and Buru, though those islands extend east and
west, while Celebes extends north and south. To-day we passed
through the Bangai group, lying between the Sula Islands and
Celebes. From the appearance of the water, and from such
soundings as are given, there appears to be only a depth of some
thirty fathoms in the straits. These islands, therefore, not only have
formed a part of the adjacent peninsula of Celebes, but do at the
present day.
A remarkable similarity has been noticed between the fauna of
Bachian, near the southern end of Gilolo, and that of Celebes, and in
the Bangai and the Sula Islands we probably behold the remnants of
an old peninsula that once completely joined those two lands. When
we compare Celebes and Gilolo, we notice that the Bangai and Sula
groups, stretching off to the east and southeast from one of the
eastern peninsulas of Celebes, are analogous in position to Gebi,
Waigiu, and Battanta, and the adjacent islands which are but the
remnants of a peninsula that in former times connected Gilolo to the
old continent of New Guinea and Australia.
 Now, at sunset, we were approaching the Buton Passage, which
separates the large island of Buton from Wangi-wangi, “The Sweet-
scented Island.” This is a great highway for ships bound from
Singapore to China in the west monsoon, and several are now here,
drifting over the calm sea.
Buton is a hilly island, but no mountains appear. Its geological
formation is said to consist of “recent limestone, containing
madrepores and shells.” Here, again, we find indications of the wide
upheaval that appears to be occurring in the whole archipelago, but
especially in its eastern part. It is quite famous for the valuable
cotton it produces, which, in the fineness and length of its fibres, is
said to excel that raised in any other part of the archipelago, and is
therefore highly valued by the Bugis and Macassars.
January 13th.—This morning we passed a large American man-of-
war coming down grandly from the west, under steam and a full
press of canvas. It is a most agreeable and unexpected pleasure to
see such a representation of our powerful navy in these remote
seas.[51]
The next day we passed through Salayar Strait, which separates
the southern end of the peninsula of Celebes from the Salayar
Islands, and may be regarded as the boundary between the
alternating wet and dry seasons on the opposite sides of Celebes.
January 15th.—Arrived back at Macassar. There is nothing but
one continuous series of heavy, pouring showers, with sharp
lightning and heavy thunder.
January 16th.—Sailed for Surabaya in Java. This morning there is
only such a wind as sailors would call a fresh, but not a heavy gale.
In all the wide area between Java and the line of islands east to
Timur on the south, and the tenth degree of north latitude, none of
those frightful gales known in the Bay of Bengal as cyclones, and in
the China Sea as “typhoons,” have ever been experienced. The chief
sources of solicitude to the navigator of the Java and the Banda
Seas are the strong currents and many reefs of coral.
 Our large steamer is little else than a great floating menagerie. We
have, as usual, many native soldiers on board, and each has with
him two or three pet parrots or cockatoos. Several of our passengers
have dozens of large cages, containing crested pigeons from New
Guinea, and representatives of nearly every species of parrot in that
part of the archipelago. We have also more than a dozen different
kinds of odd-looking monkeys, two or three of which are continually
getting loose and upsetting the parrot-cages, and, before the
sluggish Malays can approach them with a “rope’s end” unawares,
they spring up the shrouds, and escape the punishment which they
know their mischief deserves. These birds and monkeys are mostly
purchased in the Spice Islands; and if all now on board this ship
could be safely transported to New York or London, they would far
excel the collection on exhibition in the Zoological Gardens of the
latter city.
Besides the Chinese, Arabs, Malays, and other passengers
forward, there is a Buginese woman, a raving maniac. She is
securely shackled by an iron band around the ankle to a ring-bolt in
the deck. One moment she is swaying to and fro, and moaning as if
in the greatest mental agony and despair, and, the next moment,
stamping and screeching in a perfect rage, her long hair streaming in
the wind, her eyes bloodshot, and flashing fire like a tigress which
has been robbed of her young. It would be difficult to fancy a more
frightful picture. They are taking her to the mad-house near
Samarang, where all such unfortunates are kindly cared for by the
government. Her nation, the Bugis or Buginese, are famous for
“running a muck.” Amuk, which was written by the early navigators “a
muck,” is a common term in all parts of the archipelago for any
reckless, bloody onset, whether made by one or more. It is, however,
generally used by foreigners for those insane attacks which the
Malays sometimes make on any one, generally to satisfy a feeling of
revenge. When they have decided to commit a murder of this kind,
they usually take opium, and, when partially under its influence, rush
out into the street with a large knife and try to butcher the first person
they may chance to meet. Many years ago such émeutes were of
frequent occurrence, and even at the present time most of the
natives who stand guard in the city of Batavia are each armed with a
long staff, on the end of which is a Y-shaped fork, provided on the
inner side with barbs pointing backward. This is thrust against the
neck of the murderer, and he is thus secured without danger to the
policeman.
 CHAPTER XII.
SUMATRA.

On the third day from Macassar we arrived safely at Surabaya,

and thence proceeded westward to Samarang, and, on the first of
February, 1866, I was again in Batavia, having been absent in the
eastern part of the archipelago eight months. Through the courtesy
of Messrs. Dümmler & Co., of that city, who obligingly offered to
receive and store my collections and forward them to America, I was
left entirely free to commence a new journey.
The generous offer of the governor-general to give me an order for
post-horses free over all parts of Java was duly considered; but as
many naturalists and travellers have described it already, I
determined to proceed to Sumatra, and, if possible, travel in the
interior of that unexplored island, and, accordingly, on the 12th of
February, I took passage for Padang on the Menado, the same
steamer in which I had already travelled so many hundred miles.
Transcriber’s Note: Map is
clickable for a larger version.

ISLAND of SUMATRA

To Illustrate Professor Bickmore’s

Travels.
 Edwᵈ Weller

From Batavia we soon steamed away to the Strait of Sunda, and

once more it was my privilege to behold the lofty peaks in the
southern end of Sumatra. From that point as far north as Cape
Indrapura the coast is generally bordered with a narrow band of low
land, from which rises a high and almost continuous chain of
mountains extending parallel with the southwest, or, as the Dutch
always call it, the “west” coast, all the way north to Achin.
The next morning, after passing the lofty peak of Indrapura, found
us steaming in under the hills and high mountains that stand by the
sea at Padang and rise tier above tier until they reach the crest of
the Barizan chain, producing one of the grandest effects to be
enjoyed on the shores of any island in the whole archipelago.
Padang, unfortunately, has no harbor, and the place where ships are
obliged to anchor is an open, exposed roadstead. There is a
sheltered harbor farther to the south, but it would cost a large sum to
build a good road from Padang to it by cutting down the hills and
bridging the ravines. The distance from the anchorage to the city is
some three miles, and all the products exported must be taken out to
the ships on barges.
The city of Padang is situated on a small plain, whence its name;
padang in Malay, meaning an open field or plain. Its population
numbers about twelve thousand, and is composed of emigrants from
Nias, Java, some Chinese and Arabs, and their mestizo
descendants, besides the natives and Dutch. The streets are well
shaded and neat. Near the centre of the city is a large, beautiful
lawn, on one side of which is the residence of the governor. On the
opposite side is the Club-House, a large and well-proportioned
building. On the south side is a small stream where the natives haul
up their boats, and here the barges take in their cargoes. This part of
the city is chiefly filled with the store-houses and offices of the
merchants. In front of the governor’s residence is a large common.
Two of its sides are occupied by private residences and the church,
the roof of which has fallen in, and indeed the whole structure is in a
most dilapidated condition compared to the rich Club-House on the
other side of the green. Having landed and taken up my quarters at a
hotel, I called on Governor Van den Bosche, who received me
politely, and said that the inspector of posts, Mr. Theben Terville,
whose duty it is not only to care for transporting the mails, but also to
supervise and lay out the post-roads, had just arrived from Java, and
must make an overland journey to Siboga, in order to examine a
route that had been proposed for a post-road to that place.
He had promised the inspector, who was an old gentleman, the
use of his “American,” a light four-wheeled carriage made in Boston.
There was room for two in it, and he would propose to the inspector
to take me with him, and further provide me with letters to the chief
officials along the way; but as it would be two or three days before
Mr. Terville, who was then in the interior, would be ready to start, he
proposed that I should leave the hotel and make my home with him
as long as I might remain in Padang. “Besides,” he added, “I have
eight good carriage-horses in the stable, and I have so much writing
to do that they are spoiling for want of exercise; now, if you will
come, you can ride whenever you please.” So again I found myself
in the full tide of fortune. It is scarcely necessary to add that I did not
fail to avail myself of such a generous offer. In the evenings, when it
became cool, the governor was accustomed to ride through the city,
and occasionally out a short distance into the country. Our roads
were usually shaded with tall trees, frequently with palms, and to fly
along beneath them in a nice carriage, drawn by a span of fleet
ponies, was a royal pleasure, and one never to be forgotten. One
pleasant day we drove out a few miles to a large garden where the
governor formerly resided. The palace had been taken down, but a
fine garden and a richly-furnished bathing-house yet remain. The
road out from Padang to this place led through a series of low rice-
lands, and just then the young blades were six or eight inches high,
and waved charmingly in the morning breeze. The road, for a long
distance, was perfectly straight and bordered by large shade-trees. It
was one of the finest avenues I ever saw. Here I was reminded of
the region from which I had so lately come, the Spice Islands, by a
small clove-tree, well filled with fruit. Much attention was formerly
given here to the culture of the clove, but for some years raising
coffee has proved the most profitable mode of employing native
labor. There were also some fine animals in various parts of the
garden, among which was a pair of the spotted deer, Axis maculata.
Thus several days glided by, and the time for me to go up into the
interior and meet the inspector came almost before I was aware of it.
February 21st, 1866.—At 8 a. m. we started from Padang for Fort
de Kock, sixty miles from this city. A heavy shower during the night
has purified the air, and we have a clear, cool, and in its fullest sense
a lovely morning. This “American” is generally drawn by two horses,
but the governor has had thills put on so that one may be used, for
he says, between Fort de Kock, where the present post-road ends,
and Siboga, a distance of about one hundred and ninety miles, by
the crooked route that we must travel, that we shall find it difficult to
get one horse for a part of the way. Behind the carriage a small seat
is fastened where my footman sits or stands. His duty is to help
change the horses at the various stations, which are about five miles
apart. When the horses are harnessed his next duty is to get them
started, which is by far the most difficult, for most of those we have
used to-day have been trained for the saddle, and we have not
dared to put on any breeching for fear of losing our fender, these
brutes are so ready to use their heels, though fortunately we have
not needed any hold-back but once or twice, and then, by having the
footman act as hold-back himself with a long line, I have urged on
the horse, and in every case we have come down to the bottom of
the hill safely. With only a weak coolie tugging behind, of course I
have not been able to make these wild horses resist the temptation
to go down the hill at a trot, and, after running and holding back until
he was out of breath, the coolie has always let go, generally when I
was half-way down; nothing of course then remained to be done but
to keep the horse galloping so fast that the carriage cannot run on to
him, and by the time we have come to the bottom of the hill we have
been moving at a break-neck rate, which has been the more
solicitous for me, as I had never been on the road, and did not know
what unexpected rocks or holes there would be found round the next
sharp turn.
From Padang the road led to the northwest, over the low lands
between the sea and the foot of the Barizan, or coast chain of
mountains. In this low region we have crossed two large streams,
which come down from these elevations on the right, and are now
quite swollen from the recent rains. A long and large rattan is
stretched across from one bank to the other, and a path made to slip
over it is fastened to one end of a rude raft. This rattan prevents us
from being swept down the boiling stream, while the natives push
over the raft with long poles. I began to realize what an advantage it
was to ride in the carriage of the Tuan Biza, or “Great Man,” as the
Malays all call the governor. As soon as those on the opposite side
of the stream saw the carriage they recognized it, and at once came
over by holding on to the rattan with one hand and swimming with
the other. In their struggles to hasten and kindly assist, several times
the heads of a number of them were beneath the water when they
came to the middle of the stream, where the current was strongest
and the rattan very slack; but there was very little danger of their
being drowned, for they are as amphibious as alligators. I had not
been riding long over these low lands before I experienced a new
and unexpected pleasure in beholding by the roadside numbers of
beautiful tree-ferns, which, unlike their humbler representatives in
our temperate regions, grow up into trees fifteen to eighteen feet
high. They are interesting, not only on account of their graceful forms
and limited distribution, but because they are the living
representatives of a large family of trees that flourished during the
coal period.
 APPROACH TO THE “CLEFT,” NEAR PADANG.

As we proceeded, our road approached the base of the Barizan

chain until we were quite near them, and then curved again around
some spur that projected toward the sea-shore. Late in the afternoon
we came to the opening of a broad, triangular valley, and beheld on
our right, and near the head of the valley, the towering peak of
Singalang, whose summit is nine thousand eight hundred and eighty
feet above the sea. Large numbers of natives were seen here
travelling in company, returning homeward from the market at Kayu
Tanam, the next village. Their holiday dress here as elsewhere is a
bright red. Beyond Kayu Tanam the road ran along the side of a
deep ravine, having in fact been cut in the soft rock, a narrow wall of
it being left on the outer side to prevent carriages from sliding off into
the deep chasm. Suddenly, as we whirled round the sharp corners
while dashing through this place, we came into a deep cañon
extending to the right and left, called by the Dutch the Kloof, or
“Cleft,” a very proper name, for it is a great cleft in the Barizan chain.
Up this cleft has been built a road by which all the rich products of
the Padangsche Bovenlanden, or “Padang plateau,” are brought
down to the coast. Opposite to us was a torrent pouring over the
perpendicular side of the cleft, which I judge to be about seventy-five
feet in height. Where it curved over the side of the precipice it was
confined, but, as soon as it began to fall, it spread out and came
down, not in one continuous, unvarying sheet of water, but in a
series of wavelets, until the whole resembled a huge comet trying, as
it were, to escape from earth up to its proper place in the pure sky
above it. On either side of this pulsating fall is a sheet of green
vegetation, which has gained a foothold in every crevice and on
every projecting ledge in the precipice. Behind the falling water there
is a wall of black, volcanic rock, and at its foot is a mass of angular
débris which has broken off from the cliff above. Now we turned
sharply round to the north, and began ascending to the plateau. The
cleft has not been formed in a straight but in a zigzag line, so that, in
looking up or down, its sides seem to meet a short distance before
you and prevent any farther advance in either direction; but, as you
proceed, the road suddenly opens to the right or left, and thus the
effect is never wearying. It resembles some of the dark cañons in our
own country between the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada,
except that while their dark sides are of naked rock, the sides of this
ravine are covered with a dense growth of vines, shrubs, and large
trees, according to the steepness of the acclivities. Here were many
trees and shrubs with very brilliantly-colored leaves. The whole
scenery is so grand that no description, or even photograph, could
convey an accurate idea of its magnificence. For four miles we rode
up and up this chasm, and at last came on to the edge of the plateau
at the village of Padang Panjang. We were then more than two
thousand four hundred feet above the plain, having ascended about
two thousand feet in four miles. Here the inspector left word for me
to wait a couple of days for him, as he was still away to the south.
Heavy showers continued the next day, so that I had little opportunity
of travelling far; besides, it was very cool after coming up from the
low, hot land by the shore. There is almost always a current of air
either up or down this cleft, and the warm air of the coast region is
brought into contact with the cool air of the plateau, and
condensation and precipitation seems to occur here more
abundantly than at any other place in the vicinity, the number of rainy
days numbering two hundred and five. This is no doubt due to the
local causes already explained. The average temperature here is
49.28° Fahrenheit. In the cleft, at one or two places, are a few
houses made by the people who have moved down from the
plateau. They are placed on posts two or three feet above the
ground. Their walls are low, only three or four feet high, and made of
a rude kind of panel-work, and painted red. Large open places are
left for windows, which allow any one passing to look in. There are
no partitions and no chairs nor benches, and the natives squat down
on the rough floor. It requires no careful scrutiny of these hovels to
see that they are vastly more filthy than the bamboo huts of the
Malays who live on the low land.
In all the villages I have passed to-day, both on the low land and
here on the plateau, there is a pasar, or market, and, where they
have been erected by the natives, they are the most remarkable
buildings I have seen in the archipelago. They are perched upon
posts like the houses. The ridge-pole, instead of being horizontal,
curves up so high at each end, that the roof comes to have the form
of a crescent with the horns pointing upward. Sometimes a shorter
roof is placed in the middle of the longer, and then the two look like a
small crescent within a large one. Long before Europeans came to
this land these people were accustomed to meet to barter their
products, and this was their only kind of internal commerce. The next
morning I rode part way down the cleft to near the place where the
post-horses are changed, and found a marble that was soft, but so
crystalline as to contain no fossils. I understand, however, that Mr.
Van Dijk, one of the government mining engineers, discovered some
pieces of this limestone which had not been crystallized, and that he
considered the species of corals seen in them to be entirely of the
recent period. Limestone again appears in the cleft of Paningahan, a
short distance to the south. The rocks with which it is interstratified
are chloritic schists, that is, layers of clay changed into hard schists
by the action of heat and pressure.
February 23d.—The inspector arrived this morning, and we set out
together for Fort de Kock, about twelve miles distant. From Padang
Panjang the road continues to rise to the crest of a ridge or col,
which crossed our road in an easterly and westerly direction, and
connects Mount Singalang with Mount Mérapi. This acclivity is very
nicely terraced, and the water is retained in the little plats by dikes.
When any excess is poured into the uppermost in the series, it runs
over into those beneath it, and thus a constant supply of water is
kept over all. On looking upward we saw only the vertical sides of the
little terraces covered with turf, and, in looking down, only the rice-
fields. Near the crest of the col we could look down the flanks of the
Mérapi to Lake Sinkara away to the south. The earth here is a
tenacious red clay formed by the decomposition of the underlying
volcanic rocks and volcanic ashes and sand. These are arranged in
layers which have an inclination nearly parallel to the surface. The
layers of ashes and sand may have been partly formed in their
present position by successive eruptions in the summits of the
neighboring peaks, but those of clay show that the col has been
elevated somewhat since they were formed. The height of this col is
three thousand seven hundred feet, and this is the highest place
crossed by the road from Padang to Siboga. We now began slowly
to descend, passing wide, beautifully-cultivated sawas on either
hand to Fort de Kock. Here on a pretty terrace is located the house
of the Resident, who has command of the adjoining elevated lands,
so famous in the history of this island as the kingdom of
Menangkabau, whence the Malays originally migrated, whom we
have found on the shores of all the islands we have visited, and who
are very distinct from the aborigines of these islands, as we have
particularly noticed at Buru.
 WOMAN OF THE PADANG PLATEAU.

The dress of the men here is not very different from that of the
Malays of Java, but the costume of the women is remarkable. On the
head is worn a long scarf, wound round like a turban, one end being
allowed to hang down, sometimes over the forehead, and sometimes
on one side, or on the back of the head. The upper part of the body
is clothed in a baju of the common pattern, and passing over one
shoulder, across the breast, and under the opposite arm is a long,
bright-colored scarf. The ends of this, as well as that worn on the
head, are ornamented with imitations of leaves and fruit, very
tastefully wrought with gold thread. At the waist is fastened the
sarong, which is not sewn up at the ends as in other parts of the
archipelago. It is therefore nothing but a piece of calico, about a yard
long, wound round the body, and the two ends gathered on the right
hip, where they are twisted together, and tucked under, so as to form
a rude knot. As the sarong is thus open on the right side, it is thrown
apart higher than the knee at every step, like the statues
representing the goddess Diana in hunting-costume. Their most
remarkable custom, however, is distending the lobe of the ear, as
seen in the accompanying cut from a photograph of one of the
women at the kampong here at Fort de Kock. When young, an
incision is made in the lobe, and a stiff leaf is rolled up, and thrust
into it, in such a way that the tendency of the leaf to unroll will stretch
the incision. When one leaf has lost its elasticity it is exchanged for
another, and, in this way, the opening increases until it is an inch in
diameter. This must be a very painful process, judging from the
degree to which the ears of the young girls are inflamed and swollen.
A saucer-shaped ornament, with a groove in its rim, is then put into
the ear, exactly as a stud is put into a gentleman’s shirt-bosom. It is
generally made of gold, and the central part consists of a very fine
open work, so that it is very light, yet the opening in the ear
continues to increase until it is frequently an inch and a half in
diameter, and almost large enough for the wearer to pass one of her
hands through. The front part of the loop is then only attached to the
head by a round bundle of muscles, smaller than a pipe-stem, and
the individual is obliged to lay aside her ornaments or have the lower
part of her ears changed into long, dangling strings. While these
ornaments (for it is not proper to call such a saucer-shaped article a
ring) can be worn in the ear, the appearance of the native women, as
seen in the cut, is like that of the other Malay women; but as soon as
these ornaments are taken out, and the lobes of their ears are seen
to be nothing but long loops, their appearance then becomes very
repulsive. The men are never guilty of this loathsome practice. A
similar habit of distending the lobe of the ear prevails in Borneo,
among the Dyak women. It is also seen in all the Chinese and
Japanese images of Buddha, The native women of India are
accustomed to wear several small rings, not only all round in the
edge of the ear, but in the nostrils. A large number of rings are
shown in the ear of the cut of a Dyak or head-hunter of Borneo. Even
in the most civilized lands this same barbaric idea—that a lady is