NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 315 
an expedition to Buru and another to Timor, the traveller 
returned to England in August, 1883, after an absence of very 
nearly five years. 
Such is a brief outline of the author’s route, the full details 
of which he has described very pleasantly in the volume before 
us. We need scarcely say we have read it with a great deal of 
interest, and marked a good many passages for quotation, many 
more, indeed, than we here have space for. 
During his sojourn on the Cocos Keeling Islands Mr. Forbes 
had good opportunities for observing the singular habits of the 
great Cocoa-nut Crab, Birgus latro, which is to a great extent 
nocturnal in its habits, making tunnels in the ground larger 
than rabbit-burrows, which it lines with cocoa-nut fibre. It 
feeds almost exclusively on fallen cocoa-nuts, using its great 
claw to denude the fruit of the husk surrounding it, and to get 
at the eye of the nut, which it has learned is the only easy 
gateway to the interior. Mr. Forbes thus describes the mode of 
operation :— 
“Of the three eye-spots seen at the end of a cocoa-nut, only one 
permits an easy entrance. The Birgus does not waste its energies in 
denuding the whole nut, and it never denudes the wrong end. Having 
pierced the proper eye with one of its spindle ambulatory legs, it rotates 
the nut round till the orifice is large enough to permit the insertion of its 
great claw to break up the shell and triturate its contents, whose particles 
it then carries to its mouth by means of its other and smaller cheliferous 
foot. From this nutritious diet it accumulates beneath its tail a store of fat, 
which dissolves by heat into a rich yellow oil, of which a large specimen 
will often yield as much as two pints. Thickened in the sun it forms an 
excellent substitute for butter in all its uses.” 
Mr. Forbes also discovered it to be a valuable preserving 
lubricant for guns, and steel instruments; and only when a 
small bottle of it which he had had for two years was finished 
did he fully realise what a precious anticorrosive in these humid 
regions he had lost. 
The mammalian fauna of the Keelings appears to be entirely 
an introduced one. A herd of deer on Horsburgh Island is 
interesting, as being a cross between the Javan Rusa, Cervus 
hippelaphus, and the darker Sumatran species, Cervus equinus. 
Pigs run wild, and thrive remarkably well on the broken scraps 
of cocoa-nut everywhere lying about in the woods. Australian 
