A. C. OUDEMANS. ACARI. 155 



handelingen, buiten gevecht gesteld, zoodat de HH. VAN NoUHUYS en DUMAS er den 8 en 

 Juli alleen op uitgingen." 



The term boschmijten seems to indicate that Professor WlCHMANN has abandoned the 

 idea of the skin penetrating fleas, in which he is right. 



Curious and noticeable is the fact that VAN DlSSEL has not met with our mites. He 

 publishes his expériences in a taie of a Landreis van Fakfak naar Sekâr, in the extrême 

 West of New Guinea in August and September 1902. [Indische Gids, of 1904, p. 970). 



.Van ongedierte, behalve de patjets 1 ) hadden wij anders te voren geen last gehad. 

 Hier komt gelukkig niet voor de kleine boschluis, die men anders elders in Nieuw-Guinea 

 in overvloed aantreft, en die met de huid in aanraking gekomen een alleronaangenaamsten 

 jeuk veroorzaakt. Als probaat middel wordt gebruikt het sap, geperst uit de bladeren van 

 de wilde sirih-)." 



In the descriptions of the two following expéditions {Tijdschrift van het Koninklijk 

 Nederlandsch Aardrijkskundig Genootschap, Jaargang 1904, 2 e Série, Deel XXI, p. 617 and 

 p. 789) VAN DlSSEL does not corne back again on the subject, so that we may infer here- 

 upon that also then he was not vexed by the mites. 



Also in the paper of JENS we do not met with a passage concerning the mite-plague. 

 His account is entitled : De Papoea's der Geelvinkbaai door W. L. JENS. Voordracht met licht- 

 beelden, gehouden in de vergadering van 14 Mei iço^, and is published in the Handelingen 

 van de Xederlandsclie Antliropologische Vereeniging, 1904, p. 45 — 61. 



In the Supplément to the Illustrated London News, Oct. 1, n°. 3415, 1904, A. E. Pratt 

 publishes an article headed : Two years among cannibals. Seing some account of the aborigines 

 of Papna (New Guinea) and of travel and adventure in that Island. The writer, who espec- 

 ially collected objects of Natural History, mentions of plants and leaves which cause véhément 

 itching and pimples, but nothing is told of a mite which could hâve been the cause of it. 



Mr. G. A. J. van DER Sande, Physician to the Dutch Expédition of 1903, after his 

 repatriation wrote to Professor A. C. Haddon, leader of »the Cambridge Anthropological 

 Expédition to Torres Straits" asking him whether he had met with the itch-plague in those 

 countries. Prof. HADDON promptly answered that nothing was perceived of the mites during 

 his expédition of 1898, but that SELIGMANN who had just returned from British New Guinea 

 and who studied diseases etc. there, acquired later expériences, and that he, Prof. HADDON, 

 had addressed Mr. VAN DER Sande's letter to SELIGMANN. This gentleman was added as 

 physician to the expédition of Prof. HADDON in 1898 and later to the Daniels Expédition 

 to the Woodlark Archipelago. By date of January 1905 he informed Mr. VAN DER Sande 

 about the disease in question as follows : 



.1 just returned from New Guinea, where I was in médical charge of the Daniels 

 Expédition. The symptoms you mention which I always attributed to a tick though I col- 

 lected none, are common after moving through the bush in British New Guinea, where the 



1) Patjet, a Malay word signifying land-lccch. 



2) Sirih = Piper Bette L. 



