L.10, P. 6. This evening Mr. and Mrs. Woodward came down for "cocktails" (equals rum and water actually). We talked of various matters. He has been out in New Guinea for many years; she for seven. He had a station up the Sepik River in the Mandated Territory the other side of the island from here, and it was while they were there that she caught black-water fever. About 7 ock I heard Beech calling me to say that bats were flying. My shooting was none too good but I got one which turned out to be a Pipistrellus. For supper tonight we had first chicken stew and then turtle steaks from the turtle which Rand has been working on most of the day. It is known locally as the Green Turtle. Friday, Feb. 28. In Beech's garden took a large skink and one specimen of my newly described Rattus brachyrhinus. Drove out to see the traps with Beech in his Ford. Sent Aia out to see the mangrove line. He found a black rat around the base of the hill, and far out among the mangroves he discovered a Varanus lizard about a foot and a half long. This afternoon we were invited to "tea" at Dr. Vernon's farm. Beech drove us out to his place and Vernon's is merely a few hundred yards beyond. A little rustic bench and table under clumps of bamboo represented the picnic place; and we had tea, "damper" (bread made in a fryingpan), butter and jam amid the attacks of perfect hordes of mosquitos. Afterwards Vernon took us around to his plantation of baby kapok trees (tree-cottons). The biggest of them does not yet reach four feet, and the smallest is about one foot. Besides those planted out already he has quantities of seedlings still in boxes. The weeds grow at an infernal rate here, though, and it seemed to me a pretty hopeless job to try to establish such a plantat on with the little help he has. Besides kapok he showed us Ricinus, papaya, Eugenia (with pulpy fruit growing in sprays all up the trunk). I took my net along and Rand his gun. Several interesting butterflies and day-flying moths were netted. On our return I found that Aia whom I had sent out rebait traps had brought back four skinks. The skinks apparently like our combination bait better than rats do. A boy came along shortly afterwards and offered Rand a tame, immature hawk, apparently the same bird that I have twice seen along by the mission, and said to be among there. At Vernon's found a number of fat yellow "looper" caterpillars, gregarious on a shrub or young tree which Brass could not identify. On the yellow ground color they were speckled with black in definite pattern. The legs were reduced to the 3 pairs in front and 2 behind of the Geometridae but they looked far too fat and heavy to be "Geos". However one had spun up in a leaf and formed a thick heavy Hesperid-like chrysalis which I have brought back and hope to have hatch out later. Saturday, Feb. 29. Ran trapline at Beech's place. Took a small Melomys, a very large skink and three frogs. Aia went round the mangrove sets and brought back only house rats, several of them however. While waiting for Beech to finishing milking and running his milk separator I walked on through the main road to the other (south) side of the island. The Road three parts across goes over a strip of mangrove swamp about 200 yards across. It ends up at wretched fishing village of about ten or a dozen houses and some 50 inhabitants who seem to live in a dense cloud of mosquitos. The same rock appears there, coarse and finely banded shaley sandstones with similar inclusions, some of them very large, about a yard in diameter. But the dip of the rocks is slightly but unmistakably to the south instead of to the north as on this side. These opposite dips in what appears t be otherwise unfolded rocks, added to the lateritic ironstone that occours on the slightly elevated land at Beech's, Dr. Vernon's and even here on the "hill" at Daru proper leads me to suspect that we have to deal with a small dome, the upthrusting of which forced iron out to the near surface where it became weathered into the laterites.