THE ISLANDS OF THE BAY OF BENGAL. 113 



western parts of Australia, New Guinea, Celebes and the islands 

 between these two, so that its occurrence, both at the southern 

 and northern extremities of the Andaman group, is very remark- 

 able, and not easily explicable. 



Taking boat we crossed to Table Island, a great part of 

 which, having been cleared of jungle, is now clothed with short 

 fine grass, which furnishes admirable pasturage to a large herd 

 of Government cattle which are under the charge of the light- 

 house keeper. 



On this island, besides the species already mentioned, the 

 Common Swallow was abundant, hawking for flies over the 

 smooth grassy swells, and in the trees below, and the garden 

 of the light-house, huge flocks of a large Rose-band Paroquet, 

 identical as I take it with the Andaman bird (P. magnirostris) , 

 were screeching. I shot several specimens, but such dirty 

 birds I never saw; they were smeared from head to foot with 

 some kind of gum, and their plumage was generally in such 

 vile order that it was impossible to be quite certain to which 

 species or sub-species of this group they belonged ; their size, 

 however, sufficiently established the fact that they did not 

 pertain to the Ceylon form (P. eup atria). 



Going up to the light-house, the keeper, a very intelligent 

 and (as he once proved himself in a great emergency) gallant 

 fellow, gave us a long account of the cyclone of the previous 

 October, the traces of which had been very evident at Narcon- 

 dam, and which had only been less palpably destructive at 

 Table Island, because there were fewer trees left to fell. Even 

 here, however, looking out from the top of the light-house, 

 the passage of the hurricane could still be distinctly traced. 

 The island had lain exactly in the centre of the cy clone's path ; the 

 wind had been terrifically strong in one direction for some hours ; 

 then came a dead calm that lasted for a quarter of an hour ; 

 and then the wind blew with even greater violence than before, 

 but from an exactly opposite direction. The consequence was 

 that all the prostrate trunks along one side of a ridge lay in one 

 direction, and all those on the other in an opposite direction ; 

 the trees, that sheltered by the hill, escaped during the first por- 

 tion of the hurricane, having had, during the second, to bear 

 its full brunt. 



Mr. Hawkins told us that when the storm was over the 

 beach was piled up with dead and dying fish, some of them 

 of a very large size, all kinds of zoophytes and corals in the wildest 

 profusion, while every hollow of the island was tenanted by 

 hundreds of numbed or wounded sea-birds of all descriptions 



