-31- the principal food crop, but the gardens are small, and we have been able to buy only one small bunch. The natives sell quite a lot of copra to the local trade store and with the proceeds buy rice and ship's biscuits to take the place of the better food they ought to grow. Friday 3/27/53. Camp astir at 5:30 to get Wynn started on reconnaissance of Mb. Dayman and its approaches. He was to leave at 6 o'clock on the local trader's (Spiller's) boat "Ruru," but the trade station was dead at that hour. Faint action toward 7 when boys began loading two crates of chickens and sundry rolls of old wire netting for Mukawa Mission along the coast. Boat finally left about 8:15. Typical New Guinea fashion. The Ruru is a 35-foot auxiliary ketch, skippered by a native named Lawrence, and carries four tons of copra. She is on a trading trip to Medino, on the north coast of the Peninsula, and will drop Wynn there. He has with him our Gosiago boss boy, Jimmy, and a local native named Patrick. Have arranged for the Ruru to pick him up at Medino two weeks from today. A tremendous fall of rain last night, beginning about 11 o'clock. Much thunder but no lightning. The first rain in several days. It came from the NW. Botanized along the coast about 2 miles in the direction of Baniara. The Okawabero River, about 1 1/4 miles from camp, running high and turbid. Stream 40-50 yards wide, crossed on a good light suspension bridge. Steel cables; woven rattan decking. River enters the sea in a small delta with muddy flats carrying a mangrove forest of Avicennia sp. (sterile and not collected). Mostly mangrove and strand plants collected. The most interesting, an asclepiadaceous shrub (21707), gregarious in thickets and very fleshy, which I have not seen before. Saturday 3/28/53. Much thunder through last night, and several hours of steady light rain between midnight and daylight. Breeze today SE to SW. A combination of circumstances kept me in camp today. Wrenched my back yesterday when, preparing specimens, I stepped in a twisted position on a weak slat in the split palm floor of the resthouse. Mails which arrived yesterday needed attention. Quite a mail from official circles in Papua/New Guinea. Womersley, Forest Botanist, wrote that he and Dr Hoogland (Systematic Botanist, CSIRO), expected to arrive Samarai on April 27 and join our party by first available boat. Our plans call for a start toward the mountains on May 4. The standing arrangement was for Hoogland to spend about a fortnight with us on Cape Vogel to observe botanical field methods, and for Womersley to join us for part of the time in the mountains. We cannot take two extra men into the mountains. Sent a boy to Baniara with a radiogram for Womersley, and a letter explaining the situation in detail. This should not have been necessary. Womersley knew it all from our discussions in Port Moresby. A communication more difficult to handle was a letter from the Government Secretary (Lonergan), making requests for splits in our collections which were not mentioned in preliminary official "notes" or in my conferences in Port Moresby. Dwyer, Dept. of Agriculture, now wants a second set of the insect duplicates (unnamed types) "left in the Territory for use while waiting for the named collection." Julius, Govt. Anthropologist, who is charged with the establishment of a museum in Port Moresby, and who wanted nothing before, now