140 A NATURALIST IN CANNIBAL LAND 



striped red and green, made a gorgeous note of colour 

 in the landscape. 



The agriculture of these people I found to be of 

 a good type and their hospitality to strangers and 

 among themselves is very warm. 



From a collecting point of view this hill expe- 

 dition was quite the best that I had yet under- 

 taken. I made more discoveries than I could tell of 

 among the lepidoptera. My highest camp was at an 

 altitude of about 7000 feet, and I worked from there 

 down to an altitude of about 5200 feet, generally in 

 country which no white people had ever seen before. 

 I got a good many females of the Troides chimcera, 

 which the natives were accustomed to shoot for me 

 with their bows and arrows. They captured speci- 

 mens, too, with nets made most ingeniously with 

 spiders' webs. 



The manner of making these nets was this. With 

 a very fine forked stick the native would make some- 

 thing like the framework of a tennis racquet. This 

 he would run again and again through and through 

 the strong web spun by the big yellow spider common 

 in the bush there. Having thus got some web across 

 the net, I have sometimes seen the natives get a big, 

 fat spider on to the frame, then shake him off. As he 

 tried to climb up they would keep twisting the frame 

 and shaking it slightly to prevent him ever reaching 

 it. Thus the spider was made to spin fresh strands 

 for the net. I have never heard of these nets being 



