176 THE AUSTRALIAN NATURALIST. 
Crossing the great plains of Servia and Bulgaria, on the 
road to Constantinople, one first notices the large storks 
walking about, often close to the houses, and the wild fowl 
so abundant on the marshes. 
At Constantinople the common bird among the houses was 
the lead-coloured crow with darker wings; it is about the 
size of our magpie, but had a rugged, unkempt plumage, 
rather in keeping with the dirty streets of the city. 
Fish are plentiful in Constantinople. There is a large one 
with boney excrescences on the sides, known as turbut in 
the hotels, and a small silvery blue fish, which they call a 
herring. The latter are caught in large numbers in the 
Bosphorous in fine-meshed nets, split open, dried on lines for 
about three days, and sold in all the shops to the poorer 
classes. One of the curious dishes I tasted in a Turkish 
cafe was cuttle-fish, cooked in sauce made from its own ink 
bag. 
The most distinctive tree about Constantinople is_ the 
cypress. Numbers of these, with their dark funereal foliage, 
mark the sites of cemeteries that are scattered all through 
the town and. suburbs. At Scuteri an immense forest of 
cypress trees covers the great burying-places of the Turks. 
The most showy in the gardens is the Judas tree, which 
looks like an overgrown peach, covered with delicate pinkish 
purple flowers. 
Going on to Cyprus, via Smyrna and Beyrout (which latter 
town is surrounded with mulberry and olive fields), I found 
every man carrying a gun, and whenever a bird moved it 
was potted, until I wondered how any bird ever succeeded 
in getting away into the fields. In the market men were 
offering for sale strings of birds: rollers, finches, and even 
swallows. While in Cyprus I went all over the island, and 
saw much of its natural history, which has been studied by 
some well-known naturalists. A list of the fauna of the 
island contains 231 species of birds, many of which are very 
numerous. The native Cypriots do not seem to harm them. 
On the road over the barren marl chalk hills, covered only 
with very low herbage and prickly scrub, we were in the 
old lands of the plague locust, now a thing of the past. We 
saw several pairs of the large raven (Corvus corax); also a 
large eagle sailing round over the valley, and numerous 
small scattered flocks of the common brown crow. 
The great central mountain of the island is Mount Troodes, 
the slopes of which are clothed with several species of stunted 
oaks, but higher up all is pine forest. Camped at the 
