Their food is almost wholly roots and vegetables, with fish or game only as an occasional luxury, and they are consequently very subject to various skin diseases, the children especially being often miserable-looking objects, blotched all over with eruptions and sores.

If these people are not savages, where shall we find any?
Yet they have all a decided love for the fine arts, and spend their leisure time in executing works whose good taste and elegance would often be admired in our schools of design! During the latter part of my stay in New Guinea the weather was very wet, my only shooter was ill, and birds became scarce, so that my only resource was insect-hunting.

I worked very hard every hour of fine weather, and daily obtained a number of new species.

Every dead tree and fallen log was searched and searched again; and among the dry and rotting leaves, which still hung on certain trees which had been cut down, I found an abundant harvest of minute Coleoptera.

Although I never afterwards found so many large and handsome beetles as in Borneo, yet I obtained here a great variety of species.