yeipnese y Pay Be 
on the Biononuics of Southern Nigerian Insects. 331 
on any station of which he had charge, he would never 
allow anyone to grow a Pawpaw. Did we not know 
that it was the favourite food of the ¢ mosquito? Starve 
them then; make them die of inanition and the Qs not 
being hermaphrodite and autogenous, would likewise sink 
into a decline. Alas for the eupeptic pawpaw! Of 
course, coming as I do from Scotland, I may have failed 
to notice that he was jesting. But he was (I regret to 
say) a Scot too, and if one Scot can’t tell when another 
Scot is jesting, who can, I ask?” 
Farquharson’s years at Moor Plantation during the war 
were full of anxiety and discomfort. His brother was in 
the trenches in the Ypres salient and was wounded in 
October, 1917. One of his leaves home was saddened by 
the death of his father in 1916. Then, in his last two 
years there was much sickness in 8. Nigeria, although 
Farquharson himself kept well, a result which he attri- 
buted to his out-of-doors study of natural history. Thus 
he wrote on August 14, 1918 :— 
“There is not much room for what one might call the 
higher hfe. A short evening for tennis and a long one for 
cards and drinking about sums up the average official’s 
life outside the drab round of the office. Without a decent 
hobby I don’t think I could have stuck this long tour, and 
it has been a very great pleasure to me to try to fill up 
some of the few lacunae in Lamborn’s work, however im- 
perfectly. I hope I may be able to do more, but I am 
grateful indeed for the chances I’ve had to do even a 
little.” 
And earlier, in November, 1917: ‘““ When I am finding 
things, really good ones, I must say I never think of the 
possibility of going sick. The worst that can happen to 
me here is to have time to worry.” 
Farquharson considered, contrary to the usual belief, 
that the “dry season in many respects is not superior to 
the wet, up-country at least,” and that “it is in the dry 
season that men get run down, although the effects only 
come out in the wet.” 
But, however refreshing the rains may be, there appears 
to have been too much of a good thing in 1917, when he 
wrote: “I spent the whole of a wet September here. In 
my bush hut there was only one dry ‘island’ when it 
