fishers and traders in a small way, and have thus the
character of a colony who have migrated from another
district. These hillmen or “ Arfaks ” differed much in
physical features. They were generally black, but some
were brown like Malays. Their hair, though always more
or less frizzly, was sometimes short and matted, instead
of being long, loose, and woolly; and this seemed to be a
constitutional difference, not the effect of care and cultivation.
Nearly half of them were afflicted with the scurfy
skin-disease. The old chief seemed much pleased with
his present, and promised
(through an interpreter I
brought with me) to protect
my men when they
came there shooting, and
also to procure me some
birds and animals. While
conversing, they smoked
tobacco of their own growing,
in pipes cut from a
single piece of wood with
a long upright handle.
We had arrived at Do-
rey about the end of the
wet season, when the whole country was soaked with
moisture. The native paths were so neglected as to be
often mere tunnels closed over with vegetation, and in
such places there was always a fearful accumulation of
mud. To the naked Papuan this is no obstruction. He
wades through it, and the next watercourse makes him
clean again; but to myself, wearing boots and trousers,
it was a most disagreeable thing to have to go up to
my knees in a mud-hole every morning. The man I
brought with me to cut wood fell ill soon after we arrived,
or I would have set him to clear fresh paths in the worst
places. Por the first ten days it generally rained every
afternoon and all night; but by going out every hour
of fine weather, I managed to get on tolerably with my
collections of birds and insects, finding most of those
collected by Lesson during his visit in the Coquille, as
well as many new ones. I t appears, however, that Dorey
is not the place for Birds of Paradise^ none of the natives
being accustomed to preserve them. Those sold here are
all brought from Amberbaki, about a hundred miles west,
where the Doreyans go to trade.
The islands in the bay, with the low lands near the
coast, seem to have been formed by recently raised coral
reefs, and are much strewn with masses of coral but little
altered. The ridge behind my house, which runs out
to the point, is also entirely coral rock, although there
are signs of a stratified foundation in the ravines, and
the rock itself is more compact and crystalline. It is