JULY 1770 ANT-HILLS DRYING PLANTS 283 



all shifted, etc. ; many were saved, but some were entirely 

 spoiled. 



28tk. We have ever since we have been here observed 

 the nests of a kind of ant, much like the white ant in the 

 East Indies, but to us perfectly harmless : they were always 

 pyramidal, from a few inches to six feet in height, and very 

 much resembled the Druidical monuments which I have seen 

 in England. To-day we met with a large number of them of 

 all sizes ranged in a small open place, which had a very 

 pretty effect. Dr. Solander compared them to the runic 

 stones on the plains of Upsala in Sweden ; myself to all the 

 smaller Druidical monuments I had seen. 



1st July. Our second lieutenant found the husk of a 

 cocoanut full of barnacles cast up on the beach; 1 it had 

 probably come from some island to windward. 



2nd. The wild plantain trees, though their fruit does not 

 serve for food, are to us of a most material benefit. We 

 made baskets of their stalks (a thing we had learned from 

 the islanders), in which our plants, which would not other- 

 wise keep, have remained fresh for two or three days ; 

 indeed, in a hot climate it is hardly practicable to manage 

 without such baskets, which we call by the island name of 

 papa mija. Our plants dry better in paper books than in 

 sand, with the precaution that one person is entirely em- 

 ployed in attending them. He shifts them all once a day, 

 exposes the quires in which they are to the greatest heat of 

 the sun, and at night covers them most carefully up from 

 any damp, always being careful, also, not to bring them out 

 too soon in the morning, or leave them out too late in the 

 evening. 



3rd. The pinnace, which had been sent out yesterday in 

 search of a passage, returned to-day, having found a way by 

 which she passed most of the shoals that we could see, but 

 not all. This passage was also to windward of us, so that 

 we could only hope to get there by the assistance of a land 

 breeze, of which we have had but one since we lay in the 



1 The absence of the cocoanut palm on the Australian coasts is one of the 

 most singular facts in botanical geography. 



