262 MEMO IB OF DR. HARVEY. 



minor troubles, vexations, and hindrances, all of which I expect 

 to find plentifully in Australia. I am much more up to the 

 labour of travelling, collecting, and roughing it, than when I left 

 England, and better fitted to endure disappointment than I was 

 three months ago." 



The letter from which the above few sentences have been 

 taken concludes with the following notice of the white ants : — 

 " On wet evenings here the white ants are very troublesome. 

 At this season, when the young brood leave the nest, they are 

 winged, each with four large wings. In they come in troops, 

 fly round and round, flap in your face, settle in your hair, on 

 the dinner-table, anywhere, everywhere, and commence 

 desperate efforts to get rid of their wings. They twitch them 

 backwards and forwards till they fall off, and then the insect 

 crawls away to commence its mischievous mining life. Quanti- 

 ties of wings are scattered over the tables and floor. Last 

 night we had them ; to-night there are none, or I should not be 

 able to write this letter." 



On the 12th of December, Dr. Harvey left Point de Galle 

 in a steamer for Singapore, where, after a few hours' delay, 

 passengers and luggage were shifted to another vessel about to 

 start for King George's Sound, New South Wales. The passage 

 through the Straits of Malacca, with the near view afforded of 

 the Malayan shores, was not devoid of interest, though the 

 features of tropical scenery had now in a great degree lost their 

 charm of novelty. At Penang he and his fellow-passengers landed 

 to visit a waterfall ; and in this drive of four miles he found 

 the same sort of country as in Ceylon — similar flat roads bor- 

 dered by jungle, the same palms, and bananas, and wooded hills 

 — very pretty, but tame to his eye, now accustomed to " this 

 everlasting greenery." The culture here, however, of the nut- 

 meg instead of the coffee-tree afforded some diversity, as well 

 as the appearance of the rural population, who, being either 

 Chinese or Malay, were very different, he writes, " in expression 

 and costume from the long-haired Cingalese." He describes the 

 nutmeg as a very pretty tree, with leaves in size and shape like 

 those of the apple-tree, and always laden at the same time with 

 both fruit and flowers ; the latter, though different in structure, 

 resembling in form those of the arbutus ; the fruit like peaches, 

 and very ornamental. 



