L. 11, S. 1 Daru, Papua. Saturday, Mar. 7, 1936. At noon today I closed and posted letter no. 10. Rand took a canoe and ten men and crossed the strait to the South New Guinea mainland. He left about 1.30 and it is now 6 p. m. This afternoon I send out the boys to rebait the general trapline and went myself to rebait my tree traps. Afterwards went down to low tide line to collect some Mollusca and Crustacea. On my return found several bays waiting for me with butterflies, one of whom had not only collected them in excellent condition but had even put them up in papers. I drew a few pictures of wasps, grasshoppers and bugs and beetles and told them to bring them as well. They seemed to get the idea pretty well too. Rand got back about 8 oclock bringing a duck, an osprey, a Pteropus fruit-bat, and a living sulphurcrested cockatoo. He had left the canoe theother side, and the tide had done the same, so that considerable time had been taken up in getting it launched again. Dr. Vernon's party was held without his presence. He came down with a sudden attack of fever in the afternoon and was in bed while the party progressed. We played a table of bridge and the others played poker. Sunday, Mar. 8. Only four R. brachyrhinus in traps. The tree traps failed again to get anything. We'll keep them going but I fear that little hope remains of trapping Pogonomyx on Daru. The "Aramea" sailed this morning taking with Dr. Dowling and Mr. Schlenker the missionary who is going away for a month to be married. Yesterday the chrysalis taken at Dr. Vernon's (see L 10, S. 6) hatched out. The moth is species quite about here, a big yellow moth with dark speckles, more Arctiid-like than Geometrid-like. A full grown Ampelophagous sphinx caterpillar brought in on vine leaves from Beech's garden spun up yesterday among the leaves Went up to Vernon's and read a book by Aldous Huxley this afternoon. About five oclock a boy arrived with a rat which he said he had caught in his canoe which was beached just to the right of our landing ramp. He saw it first out on the shore (Sandstone beds more or less mud-covered and backed by regenerated mangrove which is as yet only a couple of feet high. The rat proved to be a large Melomys, with broad hind foot denoting arboreal habitus, color brownish gray, tail with unimbricated, rounded hexagonal scales, each of which bears but one scale hair less than a scale-length. The animal was a female and the mammae (2 pairs of inguinal only) are very large and thick as compared with those of the Rattus I have examined. They are also slightly recessed in the abdominal skin. The ear is not very large, but the eye as with most tree inhabiting, nocturnal animals is decidedly large. In the skull (roughed out) the teeth show no sign of the broadening of the meyeri group and the snout is markedly short in comparison with the dimensions of the braincase. This afternoon the boys tried to give our new cockatoo, which is filthily dirty, a bath, which accounted four the enraged squawking which we heard proceeding from under the house. No bath was given, and only one hand of the several taking part got a really severe bite. The boys love to decora e their frizzy hair: you see them going along with the flower of an Alamanda, bright yellow, drooping gra cefully over one ear; or a feather standing upright above the head; they carry their long three- or four-pronged combs sticking in their hair just anywhere; and last night our table boy appeared with three or four strips of the cotton that comes endlessly out of new bottles of pills drooping from one ear, and another strip wreathed aslant around his fuzzy mop. The effect was quite rakish, something like the tilt the Highlanders give their "bonnets". They try hard to understand you. If one thinks he catches your meaning he at once proceeds to elaborate at considerable length to the others. They pronounce their few words of English with little regard for consonants: finees for finish; lice for rice; all peas and beans are 'beans'; Aia calls motorcar 'moto'c'