on this route, and, judging from the accounts of Cheung Mai and Yunnan traders, there are no serious difficulties to be encountered. Until there is a scientific survey any expression of opinion as to the best track is little more than conjecture. From Cheung Mai to Cheung Rai there are two routes. One explored by McLeod and others, although not adversely reported upon, is certainly a difficult route; I traveled over it in 1880 to Cheung San and found the highest point passed over to be thirty-five hundred feet above the Cheung Mai plain, and the ascent is abrupt.
The second of the two routes mentioned above has never been described; until 1880 this route had never been traveled by a white man. In January of that year I traveled over it, and found it, as I thought, possessed of advantages over the other road. Proceeding from Cheung Mai in a northerly direction, following the course of the Maping River to a point fifty-five miles north of Cheung Mai, thence in a direction east by north-east, at a distance of twenty miles from the Maping River we entered a large and fertile plain lying to the east and south-east of Cheung Rai, and separated from that province only by a low range of hills; traveling through this plain to the Ma-Kok River, and following the course of that river, the journey to Cheung Rai is a very easy one. This plain, situated to the east and south-east of Cheung Rai, although un-
