512 



New Guinea. 



in all sense of order, comfort, or decency. Yet such is the case. 

 They live in the most miserable, crazy, and filthy hovels, which 

 are utterly destitute of any thing that can be called furniture ; 

 not a stool, or bench, or board is seen in them, 

 no brush seems to be known, and the clothes 

 they wear are often filthy bark, or rags, or 

 sacking. Along the j^aths where they daily 

 pass to and from their provision-grounds, not 

 an overhanging bough or straggling briar 

 ever seems to be cut, so that you have to 

 brush through a rank vegetation, creep under 

 fallen trees and spiny creepers, and wade 

 through pools of mud and mire, which can 

 not dry up because the sun is not allowed to 

 i penetrate. Their food is almost wholly roots 

 ^ and vegetables, with fish or game only as an 

 ^ occasional luxury, and they are consequently 

 H very subject to various skin diseases, the 

 i children especially being often miserable- 

 ) looking objects, blotched all over with erup- 

 l tions and sores. If these people are not sav- 

 l ages, where shall we find any ? Yet they 

 " have all a decided love for the fine arts, and 

 q spend their leisure time in executing works 

 3 whose good taste and elegance would often be 

 ^ admired in our schools of design ! 



During the latter part of my stay in New 

 Guinea the weather was very wet, my only 

 shooter was ill, and birds became scarce, so 

 that my only resource was insect-himting. I 

 worked very hard every hour of fine weather, 

 and daily obtained a nvmiber of new species. 

 Every dead tree and fallen log was searched 

 and searched again ; and among the dry and 

 rotting leaves, which still hung on certain 

 trees which had been cut down, I found an 

 abundant harvest of minute Coleoptera. Al- 

 though I never afterward found so many large and hand- 

 some beetles as in Borneo, yet I obtained here a great va- 

 riety of species. For the first two or three weeks, while 



