BRITISH GUIANA (1) 105 
seeking zoological specimens. The system has obvious disad- 
vantages, for the fellows are then always in debt and are forever 
borrowing more, and if any turn out to be useless it means that 
the advance has been lost. 
Bartica was populated with blacks, and there was every facility 
for producing anything in the way of food, but all my provisions, 
including fish and meat on ice, came up on the weekly river 
steamer from Georgetown. The coastal regions are populated 
largely by Indians (from India, not aboriginals), who are indus- 
trious people producing the bulk of the fruit, rice, and vege- 
tables. 
I soon became familiar with the forest adjacent to the penal 
settlement. The first encounter with these great forests gives one 
a slight feeling of awe rather like that experienced when entering 
a cathedral for the first time. The magnitude and splendor of it 
all seems beyond the powers of absorption by the human brain. 
Until one’s eyes are trained there may seem little to see near the 
forest floor, and at first all life seems to be concentrated in the 
treetops, but these are at such a height and so closely knit into 
a single canopy that observation from the ground is well-nigh 
impossible. The first exciting moment came when one of the 
giants of the butterfly world—a Blue Morpho—flashed past me 
with a swift undulating flight, its metallic sky-blue wings shining 
like enamel as they occasionally caught the sun’s rays. Their 
swift, almost bird-like flight renders them very difficult to catch 
in a net in the ordinary way, but they are easily enough trapped 
by the simple expedient of suspending peeled bananas, soaked in 
strong rum, from the boughs of forest trees. After these have been 
hanging for some time the butterflies get the smell of the rum- 
cum-banana, and settle on the fruit, sucking the luscious juice. 
I used to inspect daily a line of these simple lures that I had put 
in the forest for a lepidopterist who had joined forces with me 
but was scared to venture into the forest. It was amazing how 
these doped butterflies clung to the banana, allowing one to slip 
a net gently upwards over them. 
This morpho-hunting campaign had an amusing sequel. I used 
to carry the rum-soaked bananas around in a billy-can in the 
bottom of which there was always a little rum that had oozed 
