nd the threads
composing these are so strong and glutinous as to require much trouble
to free oneself from them. Then their inhabitants, great yellow-spotted
monsters with bodies two inches long, and legs in proportion, are
not pleasant to o run one's nose against while pursuing some gorgeous
butterfly, or gazing aloft in search of some strange-voiced bird. I soon
found it necessary not only to brush away the web, but also to destroy
the spinner; for at first, having cleared the path one day, I found the
next morning that the industrious insects had spread their nets again in
the very same places.

The lizards were equally striking by their numbers, variety, and the
situations in which they were found. The beautiful blue-tailed species
so abundant in Ke was not seen here. The Aru lizards are more varied
but more sombre in their colours--shades of green, grey, brown, and even
black, being very frequently seen. Every shrub and herbaceous plant was
alive with them, every rotten trunk or dead branch served as a station
for some of these active little insect-hunters, who, I fear, to satisfy
their gross appetites, destroy many gems of the insect world, which
would feast the eyes and delight the heart of our more discriminating
entomologists. Another curious feature of the jungle here was the
multitude of sea-shells everywhere met with on the ground and high up on
the branches and foliage, all inhabited by hermit-crabs, who forsake the
beach to wander in the forest. I lave actually seen a spider carrying
away a good-sized shell and devouring its (probably juvenile) tenant. On
the beach, which I had to walls along every morning to reach the forest,
these creatures swarmed by thousands. Every dead shell, from the largest
to the most minute, was appropriated by them. They formed small social
parties of ten or twenty around bits of stick or seaweed, but dispersed
hurriedly at the sound of approaching footsteps. After a windy night,
that nasty-looking Chinese delicacy the sea-slug was sometimes thrown
up on the beach, which was at such times thickly strewn with some of the
most beautiful shells that adorn our cabinets, along with fragments
and masses of coral and strange sponges, of which I picked up more than
twenty different sorts. In many cases sponge and coral are so much
alike that it is only on touching them that they can be distinguished.
Quantities of seaweed, too, are thrown up; but strange as it may seem,
these are far le