The flora and fauna are to a great Extent Aus tralian. Some districts are hungry and barren, while in others food is ialentiful. Areca palm, bread fruit, wild mango, and chestnut, pandanus, erotons of variegated leaf, crimson dracmnfe, orchids, creepers, and ferns flourish near watercourses and rivers, or in gorges and ravines of the hills. Bananas are plentiful, and a few yams are grown. Taro is abundant in some places ; and sugar-cane, pumpkins, melons, wild mango, and cucumber are found to flourish in others. A great deal of sago, too, is made from the sago-palm, and the native dietary is eked out not only by cocoanuts, but by shellfish, lizards, beetles, and, writes Mr. Wallace, almost every kind of large insect, eaten either raw or cooked, so that the people are never half-starved like the Australians. The coasts are rich in mother-of-pearl shell, tortoise-shell, pearl oysters, trepang, and fish.
The flora is rich in Filices, Scitaminem, Aroidete with edible roots, Convolvulacete and Solanacem. The Graminere furnish saccharum, milium, oryza, zea, the beautiful Phalaris arundinacea. Amongst the fruit trees are seen the Carica papaya, Musa paradisiaca, Bromelia ananas, Citrus aurantium in great quantity, Canarium commune, Terminalia catappa and Myristica moschata. Along the shore there are Rhizophora, Myrobalanus, Mangium, Avicennia, Barringtonia, Elmocarpus, Xanthoxy lutn, Celastrinem, Ficus, Ricinus, Artocarpus, Calamus, Flagellaria, Bambusa, Acacia, and Casuarina. More than 150 kinds of insects,
Scarabei, Buprestides, Curculionides, and also beautiful Lepidopteres and Hemipteres. This country is also rich in beautiful coloured Arach nides. Amongst the birds there are found Psittacus galeritus, Phlyctolaphus sulphureus, Psittacus aterrimus, and species of Buceros. Of the birds of paradise are the brown-feathered with beautiful white and orange-coloured feathers on the sides ; the wholly black with long tail and large bent beak ; a small yellow kind with orange-coloured breast ; another kind, red with two pens projecting_ from the tail, with a small green-coloured curled bunch of feathers at the ends. Epimachus magnus, a bird of the coasts of New Guinea, is the Upupo. magna, Gm., and U. superba, Lath. Its tail is three feet long, and its head-feathers are lustrous steel-blue. The marn miferous animals are few in number. Some wild hogs, and a species of marsupial, Perameles doryanus, about the size of a rat, with scanty red dish hair like bristles, an extended pointed snout, short tail, and a pocket on the belly in which it carries its young ones; the cuscus, flying ph alanger, and the echidua or prickly ant-eater. There is no elephant, leopard, or tiger.—Salurday Review; Moresby in J. R. Geog. Soc.; D'Albera New Guinea ; Voyage of the Triton, 1828 ; Bikmore, p. 204 ; A. R. 1Vallace ; Mr. G. Lawes.