476 bulletin: museum of comparative zoology. 



hit complexions, "European" clothes, bare feet, and lambas, big 

 white cotton cloths wrapped around their shoulders. 



Tananarive or Antananarivo, the "town of a thousand," has a 

 population of about 80,000, and is built, at an elevation of some 

 4,500 feet, on the slopes of a long and narrow stony ridge, overlooking 

 an extensive rice plain. The original town of wooden palaces and 

 rush houses, has been largely rebuilt, since the introduction of brick 

 and stone, about 1870. Here Mr. Widsin spent several days buying 

 supplies, and completing arrangements for his expedition. 



The first stage of his collecting explorations led him across the island 

 to Morondava, about two thirds of the way down the west coast. 

 The journey began with a day's automobile trip of 170 kilometres to 

 the little town of Antsirabe, which proved to be a pleasant European 

 looking place, with an inn, several shops, and a small colony of agree- 

 able Europeans. Here he hired twenty-eight porters, eight of whom 

 carried a hammock, and marched seven days to Miandrivazo, on the 

 Mahajile River, a branch of the Tsiribihina, which empties on the 

 west coast, some hundred kilometres to the north of Morondava. 

 The town where he now found himself consists of rectangular, white- 

 washed, adobe houses, about twelve by twenty feet, wath dirt floors 

 and small windows without glass. The grass-thatched roofs and 

 overhanging verandas, while they give the town a picturesque appear- 

 ance, do not dispel the impression that the place is capable of much 

 improvement by a little effort, which the natives are too lazy to make. 

 This collection of native villages which constitutes the town, is a 

 government-post anrl post-office. The officials who constitute most 

 of the white population live in well-built adobe houses with board 

 floors, and form a colony whose life resembles that of a small provin- 

 cial French town. For some days Mr. Wulsin made Miandrivazo 

 his headquarters for collecting; his Swahili boys being indefatigable 

 in that work. 



He next proceeded down the river, with a flotilla of six narrow 

 dugouts lashed together in pairs. The first day and a half was 

 through coimtry similar to that about Miandrivazo, a broafl valley 

 full of ponds and marshes, studded with banana groves and rice fields, 

 and fianked on each side by sharp low hills. Then the country changed 

 to a narrow valley with steep hills wooded to the water's edge; and 

 culminated in I^es Gorges des Bemena. The party spent two days 

 collecting in this neighborhood, getting twenty-five Lemurs in the 

 general bag. 



Once out of the Gorge the canoes drifted down a winding, tranquil 



