Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/493

Rh to banyan trees: and one wanders about as in a land of enchantment, amid traveler's palms, which will spout water if one punctures a stalk, breadfruit, cocoanuts, nutmegs, cinnamon, deadly upas trees, Bauhinia racemosa, with its cable-like stems, and the telegraph-plant, Desmodium gyrans, automatically lifting and dropping its leaves. Incidentally, too, there are zoological interests. Not uncommon are trees infested with flying foxes: and in the neighborhood the traveler to the east may see his first elephant working in the fields, but willing to show his paces for a few pice; so too one might happen to make the acquaintance of land-leeches, which find their way unpleasantly through the

buttonholes of his shoes. But as an offset to this he may see a wild peacock, glorious in color. Or he may discover a cobra and induce it to display its hood.

The Museum in Madras is in many regards a quite modern institution. Its buildings are new and spacious built of dark brick and terra-cotta in Indo-Saracenic style, Fig. 4. Its collections illustrate admirably the natural history, archeology and art of southern India. Included with it, also, is the important Connamera library, rich in material relating to the history of Madras. The natural-history section is the oldest of the museum, part of its collection dating from 1846, Fig. 5, and it has the interest of including within its animal galleries a number of living specimens. The archeological section is rich in prehistoric objects, especially pottery: it contains, however many objects of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, arms armor and cannon, of the days of European as well as native wars. Among the other curious