FIJI ISLANDS. 30 



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Tims the man procured it with the least possible expenditure of 

 labour on his part. Similar grinding places, with grooves cut in 

 the rock, whither natives used to come to grind their stone axes, 

 are known in Australia. 



There are no roads in the island of Kandavu, merely narrow 

 tracks through the woods and along the shores, which it is 

 excessively tiring to traverse. I made one shooting excursion 

 at Kandavu. The route lay first amongst beds of reeds on a 

 small expanse of flat land at the mouth of the valley in which 

 the stream runs ; then skirting a mangrove swamp bordering the 

 shallow interior lagoon part of the bay, led amongst " taro " beds, 

 and up a steep slope into the densely tangled woods. Here the 

 trees were matted together with creepers overhead, and climbing 

 ferns (Lygoclium) twined up the trunks in the shade beneath. 



Two young Fijians went with me. We climbed the steep 

 dark path for a long time without hearing any bird at all. To 

 see a bird without having heard it first was, from the denseness 

 of the foliage, impossible. At last we heard a curious low 

 whistling cry of two constantly repeated notes. The natives 

 soon made out the bird overhead, but it was long before I could 

 get a glimpse of it amongst the leaves, and as they kept bringing 

 me nearer and nearer, in order to show me the bird, I was so 

 close at last that it was nearly knocked to pieces by a charge of 

 No. 12 shot. It is a constant difficulty in collecting birds in 

 these dense tropical woods, that the birds are only able to be 

 distinguished at very close quarters. 



The bird proved to be a new species of Pigeon, Chryscena 

 viridis (Layard), peculiar to Kandavu Island. It is small and 

 of a yellowish-green colour with a yellow head. The pigeons 

 of the genus Chryscena have a very remarkable structure in the 

 feathers of the breast and neck. The barbs of these feathers 

 are devoid of barbules, but are provided instead with a series of 

 small swellings, ranged at intervals along them. The plumage 

 of the bird has thus, to the naked eye, a peculiar loose 

 appearance. 



The Kandavu Island birds were formerly erroneously sup- 

 posed to be the young of another Fijian species, Chryscena 

 luteovirens, and we thus, considering all our specimens to be 



