172. lantana is anything but a benign weed. It will carry fire. Fire can creep over the undecayed leaf litter which always lies on the ground under lantana. Spells of dry weather increase a fall of leaves which is copious at all times. Growth is so rampant and profuse in good times that leafy new branches shade out and kill the old. Falling leaves become caught up by tangles of dead and living branches and form nests and often large masses of inflammable material above the level of the ground. A fire in the lantana will scorch and kill neighboring rain forest. And so the destruction progresses. Cairns is in a climatic tension zone where rain forest and savanna forest compete for occupation of the land. It is a contest between grasses and woody plants, the grasses and grassland trees of the svanana forest tending to occupy the drier and less fertile soils. Enough of the original vegetation remains to indicate that, before disturbance by the white man, who has been mainly concerned in clearing land that can be plowed to grow sugarcane, rain forest occupied most of the area. Considerable extents of sandy, acid soil on the lowlands were covered with Eristania-Acacia savanna forest, while some of the drier foothill ridges carried Eucalyptus savanna forest. The fringes of streams, the extensive rich alluvial flats, at least some of the smooth loamy ridge lands of the coastal plain, and the greater part of the mountain slopes, supported rainforest. Only relic scraps of rainforest remain on cultivable land, and it would appear that a good deal of sugar cane is grown off land which formerly carried savanna forest. Rain forest is receding on the non-arable mountain slopes, as a result of fire, and as the forests receded the grasses gain ground. Occupation of burned forest land by lantana is only a temporary phase and it does not always follow the burning of forest. Grasses, mainly perennial, rhizomatous blady-grass (Imperata arundinacea), dispersed by wind-blown seed, may be the first colonizers of the burned forest ground, and once established, the grasses will retain control as long as fires occur often enough to keep forest regenerative growths in check. While under present conditions rainforest is losing ground on the mountain slopes, and being replaced by grasses which set up conditions favorable for the establishment and growth of savanna forest trees, the situation is reversed on tracts of infertile sandy soil on the lowlands. There may be seen savanna forests in which, due to exclusion of the fairly frequent fires which seem necessary for the maintenance of savanna forest of any type on any sort of soil in this climate, rainforest pioneer trees and shrubs are taking hold under the open canopy of the original trees and initiating a change to a rainforest type of vegetation. Gilbert Bates has contributed some of the above information on lantana and the retreat of the rainforests. Wed. Sept. 29: My missing raiment has turned up. Marie, when she returned from Cooktown last week, sent it to the cleaners. Late this afternoon, Marie got back to Cairns from a 3-day tour of the Atherton Tableland and the Babinda area. Geoff, George and Van arrived on the "Merinda" from Cooktown about 4PM. Gallop drove me to the wharf to meet them. The Merinda called at the Bloomfield River settlement and there took on board an unconventional tourist who is poking about on her own and visiting some cut-of-the-way places on this coast. This is Lady Bissett, wife of the captain of the "Queen Mary." She speaks with a slight accent which might be Cockney. Certainly it is not Oxford. Middle aged, shortish, stoutish, and unaffected, she had amongst her many pieces of baggage one of those rough baskets which natives make in a hurry from green coconut leaves. T The final trip by George and Van out of Cooktown did not yield very much, but the catch included two specimens of [illegible] Leggadina, taken from under sheets of galvanized iron lying on the ground. The one other specimen we have of this tiny