IN your review (NATURE, vol. xi. p. 207) of Mr. J. Thomson's very interesting work on the “Straits of Malacca, Indo-China, and China,” you have justly acknowledged that the author “makes no pretension to have travelled in the interests of science, but only to be a photographer and an observer of the ways of men;” and as his excellent book will no doubt have a wide circulation, it may perhaps not be an unthankful office to correct two statements with reference to the natural history of Penang, which I had some opportunity of studying during a sojourn there of some eighteen months.