A VISIT TO THE SOLOMON ISLANDS 103 



Sorcery is rife in the villages, the magician or pouri- 

 pouri man holding a sway of dread over men and 

 women. It is a usual thing at the fall of night in 

 a Solomon village, for the " medicine men " to take 

 large branches of trees and beat the streets with them 

 in order to frighten away evil spirits. 



My collecting party at Guadalcanar consisted, 

 besides myself, of Eichhorn, seven New Guinea boys 

 and four New Hebrides boys. With a little training 

 the New Guinea boy, or the Kanaka, makes a very 

 good collector. I supply him with a black japanned 

 collecting-box, a quantity of pins, a butterfly-net, 

 and a number of pill-boxes for the smaller insects. 

 These smaller insects he puts into the pill-boxes 

 alive without touching them. The larger butterflies 

 he kills and fixes into the collecting-box (which has 

 a cork lining) with pins. My usual method would 

 be to send the native collectors out at 7.30 in the 

 morning, and they would stop out all day, returning 

 after sundown, and handing over their collections to 

 me then. I would examine what they had brought, 

 killing all the little insects with cyanide and killing 

 the big ones by injecting oxalic acid into their bodies. 

 Then I would put them away until the next morning, 

 and devote the day hours to their setting and 

 packing. 



Now that I had got into the ways of collecting, I 

 very rarely attempted any work with the net myself, 

 trusting to the boys to bring in what they might 



