186 A NATURALIST IN CANNIBAL LAND 



move. I attempted no medical treatment, except 

 putting some ointment on the abscess. It got all 

 right in time : most things do if you leave them alone 

 long enough. It was not the first time that I had 

 suffered from abscesses. Sometimes, after long spells 

 of poor food without a sufficient supply of vegetables 

 in tropical districts, my blood would get poor, and 

 the sign of this would be the breaking out of painful 

 abscesses. 



Though I was ill and could not move most of the 

 time, my boys, assisted by the local natives, did some 

 collecting under my direction, and I got specimens of 

 the butterfly that I wanted; not very many, but 

 sufficient for my purpose. Apart from that I 

 remember getting nothing new that was notable. 



The last few years have made a great difference 

 in the people of Bougainville, and there are now 

 plenty of places on the coast where a person will be 

 in perfect safety. But men are not able to go far 

 into the interior yet, excepting as far as the flat 

 land is concerned. The high ranges have not been 

 explored so far. 



I was able to collect nothing but what I had got 

 on a previous trip to the Solomon Islands, excepting 

 the Papilio, of which I obtained about forty bred 

 specimens. I also collected three specimens of a 

 Papilio which seemed vaguely familiar but which I 

 could not place. It is a smaller edition of codrus 

 in shape and colour, but with more colour, and the 



