the basket. As I understand it the basket can only be worked on when the root is damp. The baskets we acquired were said to have taken three moons to construct. Hamlin came in in the evening with reports of a wet and rotten day. He was in the act of giving two pigeons away to Wagga when Dr. Drowne rescued one of them. It turned out to be a completely new bird, a yellow-legged ground pigeon. Dr. Drowne has never seen it before or heard of it or anything like it. It is given No. 273 on our list, and will fit into the Whitney S. S. number in whatever thirty thousand is attained with No. 273 as its final digits. Iris is yellow orange, it is a female specimen, and measures about 15 inches over all. It is curious that in a bird collector's camp the rarest bird taken had to be salvaged from a native kaikai fire, and the bird, the native, the fire, and the collector, must be allowed to burn together, wafting over the his- tory of the expedition the smokes of poetic justice. The reason for the episode is, of course, the re- semblance of this bird to the red-knobbed pigeon, having the same dark feathers touched with green and the same general silhouette. January 18th. Morning collecting today in which no new birds were acquired and in which we succeeded only in adding to our list of species in series. And operations on these birds were pleasantly upset by the arrival of the much heralded Mr. Kemp, the exiled part- er of Pat Fordyce. Kemp, more intimately Jerry Kemp, as an anti-climax