Friday, June 18: With Geoff for company, and Willie carrying collecting bag and axe, this AM I went to the top of Mt. Shea (622 ft.), the highest point on Iron Range proper. Mist clouds hang on the sharp top of the mountain in early morning, but when looked at through glasses scrub hickory (Acacia) can be distinguished in the covering rainforest, and where hickory grows the forests are always dryish and brushy. The only interesting plant for a poor morning's collecting was palm 19250, common in clumps at 4 to 5 hundred feet and not seen elsewhere. Including 4 spp. of Calamus, I have seen 11 spp. of palms in the Iron Range area, and collected five of them. Have not been able to find flowers or fruits of the others. Have noticed that one small palm, common in floodplain rainforest, and usually dead or dying, is being attacked by some mammal, probably Uromys, which eats out the "heart" of young leaves. Yesterday morning I went down to the drone with Pinwell to see the plane come in, and afterwards we drove south several miles on one of the old military tracks leading over and between poor messmate ridges in the direction of the coast. Country very poor for plants, but one botanical prize was Isoetes 19218, found by merest chance while digging small herbs from shallow moist soil in the rock bed of a seasonal stream. The messmate (Eucalyptus tetradonta) ridges rank next to the turkey bush country for sterility of soil, and heaths and other turkey bush shrubs are often found on them. The tempo of the hunt for larger mammals has increased amazingly since Don Vernon's blackboy started on the job three days ago. Old Moreton, George's hunter, is working as never before, but it looks like a lost game for him. Using a single-barrel shot gun which I have loaned him, James in his first morning brought home 3 cuscus. In four days he has shot 7, and an Echidna. The echidna was actually dug out from amongst the roots of a big tree in floodplain rainforest, and brought in alive. Vernon has presented it to us, and we have given him a magnificent male cassowary which Moreton somewhat salvaged his reputation by shooting yesterday. Saturday, June 19: Following a track which George has cut for trapping, I spent the morning in the big rainforest body north of the Wenlock road and between the Past and Running Claudie Rivers. Traversed the flood plain of the past Claudie roughly NW west for about a mile, then mounted the 100-200 ft. ridge between the two rivers. Soil on the ridge generally stoney and the forest anything but luxuriant and containing a good deal of the acacia-hickory. Cut down several fair-sized trees, but the most interesting collection was the common gregarious bamboo of the forests (19255). This bamboo is abundant on the flood-plain in extensive thickets up to perhaps 20 ft. high, and it is also found on the x moister soils of the ridges. It appears to have two growth forms, and after flowering it dies. Apparently, when about to flower, it sends up stems much longer and thicker than those seen in any of the non-flowering thickets. Seeing thickets of these 30 to 40 ft. stems, almost always completely dead, one is apt to think there are two spp. of bamboo in the forests, but a comparison of the leaves shows that the dead thickets and the living ones are of the same species. The stems of this bamboo are obscurely Z-angled, which is most unusual in bamboos, and the walls of the internodes are so thin that a stem an inch thick can be crushed between finger and thumb. The latest mammal of special interest is a small, rudescent bandicoot which Ven found dead in its form. Quite different in color from any bandicoot we have collected on the Peninsula or in the Cairns district. A fruit bat of the New Guinea genus Dobsonia, shot by Ven, is the second specimen known from Australia.