parents in the old homestead. Daughter Ivy, who works in Cairns, was home on vacation. A nephew, Austin, helped old George and the boys with the logging and lived as one of the family. We visited Speewah chiefly to try for the striped marsupial cat which Rob Veivers had told us about, and which old George too had seen and shot in the neighborhood years ago. None of the younger generation had seen the beast. Van did the general trapping, while George (Tate) concentrated on hunting morning and afternoons for Hypsipremnodon, and at night for the striped cat. Van did night hunting too. For all this, only one bandicoot was shot. But Van did well with traps. A total of 30 specimens for three night's trapping with 45 traps; including a series of four good specimens of the marsupial mouse got before in the Mossman Gorge. The mammal prize was a single catch of a small rat that looks like Stenomys, a New Guinea genus not yet known from Australia. Was disappointed in the locality for plants. Most of the few rainforest spp. in flower or fruit were trees too big to collect. The savanna-forests carried little besides the big eucalypts (blue gum, bloodwood, red stringbark, ironbark, Moreton Bay ash, podargie) and the dominant grasses. The most interesting type of open forest was a savanna-forest of Casuarina 18201, which is rather puzzling. The trees are generally 20-30 ft. high, and growing closely enough to form a thin canopy. They grow on steep hills of deep red soil, or of very stoney soil in which there are quantities of quartz. They also cover some flats of sandy loam which old photos show to have formerly been occupied by tall Eucalyptus forest. It is possible that on the hills too, Casuarina has come in after the felling of the original timber. Two of the great vegetable curses of North Queensland coastal areas are much in evidence at Speewah. These are "Mackie's Curse" (Chrysopogon acicularis) and Lantana" (L. camara). The former is supposed to have been introduced by one Mackie of Gordonvale, as a lawn grass. Its barbed seeds have carried it far and wide in the tropical high rainfall region. At Speewah it completely covers parts of the clearing and has spread into the savanna-forests, but it has been found that molasses grass (Panicum sp.), if planted and not too heavily grazed, will oust it in a few years. Lantana has fleshy fruits which are carried by birds. At Speewah it forms frightful tangles in the drier marginal parts of the rainforests, and occupies small clearings in the rainforests. It also spreads out into the savanna-forest. A bad feature of lantana is that it will burn in the dry season. Fire in the lantana is carried into the rainforest and in the aggregate, a considerable area of rainforest must be killed in this way in North Queensland every year. In the usually severe dry season of 1946 there were many lantana fires locally destructive to rainforest in the Cairns area. The evidence is seen on the mountain sides. Areas of dead grey timber, usually in strips on spur ridges, from a few miles north of Cairns, where continuous rainforest ends on the coastal slopes of the Main Range, down to Fishery Creek on the north end of the Bellenden Ker Range, which brings one into the heaviest rainfall area of Australia, and is nearly as far south as I have been on land on this trip. On one of the long spur ridges of Bell's Peak, on the Coast Range, is a strip of dead rainforest said by Thomson to have been killed by a lantana fire in 1946. Information on lantana fires on the coastal slopes of the Main Range is from Bates, Stephens and from Carruthers, forest officer in Cairns. The greatest destruction of rainforest as a result of lantana fires on the coastal slopes of the Main Range appears to be in the vicinity of Cairns, where it is evident that rainforest and savanna-forest are in a delicate state of balance in their competition for the occupation of lowlands and lower mountain slopes. It may be that, but for civilized man and his fires and introduced lantana, the tendency would be for rainforest to replace savanna-forest, rather than vice versa.