Vol. XVIII, No. 9 WASHINGTON September, 1907 



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STRANGE SIGHTS IN FAR-AWAY PAPUA 



Seen by A. E. Pratt 



Gill Medalist of the Roval Geographic Society 



The follozving article has been abstracted by the Editor from "Tzvo Years 

 Among the Cannibals of Nezv Guinea," by A. B. Pratt, and recently published 

 by J. B. Lippincott Co. Pp. 360. 6 .v g inches. §4 illustrations and map. 



IN the course of thirty years of al- 

 most continuous journeying in both 

 hemispheres, it has been my fortune 

 to stray far from the beaten tracks and to 

 know something of the spell and mys- 

 tery of the earth's solitudes. My work 

 in quest of additions to the great natural 

 history collections, both public and pri- 

 vate, of England, and to a less extent of 

 France, has led me to the Rocky Moun- 

 tains, the Amazon, the Republic of Co- 

 lombia, the Yangtse gorges, and the 

 snows of Tibet ; but it is safe to say that 

 none of these has aroused my interest 

 and curiosity in so great a degree as the 

 scene of my latest and my next expedi- 

 tion, the still almost unexplored Papua, 

 the second largest of the world's islands, 

 and almost the last to guard its secrets 

 from the geographer, the tiaturahst, and 

 the anthropologist. 



Fifty years ago schoolboys, looking at 

 their map of Africa, blessed the Dark 

 Continent for an easy place to learn. A 

 few names fringed the coast ; inland 

 nearly all was comprehended under the 

 cheerful word "unexplored." Such in 

 great measure is the case with New 



Guinea today. Its 300,000 square miles 

 of territory, held by Great Britain, Ger- 

 many, and the Netherlands, and now ly- 

 ing fallow, are destined in the course of 

 the next half century to enrich the worlds 

 of commerce and of science to a degree 

 that may to some extent be forecasted by 

 what is already known of very restricted 

 areas. 



Be this as it may, one thing remains 

 sure, the extraordinary value of Papua to 

 the man of science, particularly to the 

 entomologist and the ornithologist. In 

 the department of ornithology alone we 

 already know of 770 different species of 

 birds inhabiting the mainland and the 

 islands, which places it in this respect far 

 above Australia, which, with a superficial 

 area nine times greater, possesses less 

 than 500 species in all. 



The ethnologist, too, has in Papua a 

 happy hunting ground, for the tribes on 

 the fringe of exploration present wonder- 

 ful varieties of type, and as the mountain 

 fastnesses of the interior are gradually 

 opened up, there can be no doubt that 

 rich material for the propounding of new 

 problems and perhaps the solution of old 



