e mosquitoes were
remarkably large, and of a greyish colour. They flew about literally in
clouds, and it was practically impossible to keep clear of them.

The natives treated the bites with an ointment made from a kind of penny-
royal herb and powdered charcoal. Talking about pests, in some parts the
ants were even more terrible than the mosquitoes, and I have known one
variety--a reddish-brown monster, an inch long--to swarm over and
actually kill children by stinging them. Another pest was the leech. It
was rather dangerous to bathe in some of the lagoons on account of the
leeches that infested the waters. Often in crossing a swamp I would feel
a slight tickling sensation about the legs, and on looking down would
find my nether limbs simply coated with these loathsome creatures. The
remarkable thing was, that whilst the blacks readily knew when leeches
attacked them, I would be ignorant for quite a long time, until I had
grown positively faint from loss of blood. Furthermore, the blacks
seemed to think nothing of their attacks, but would simply crush them on
their persons in the most nonchalant manner. Sometimes they scorch them
off their bodies by means of a lighted stick--a kind office which Yamba
performed for me. The blacks had very few real cures for ailments, and
such as they had were distinctly curious. One cure for rheumatism was to
roll in the black, odourless mud at the edge of a lagoon, and then bask
in the blazing sun until the mud became quite caked upon the person.

The question may be asked whether I ever tried to tell my cannibals about
the outside world. My answer is, that I only told them just so much as I
thought their childish imaginations would grasp. Had I told them more, I
would simply have puzzled them, and what they do not understand they are
apt to suspect.

Thus, when I showed them pictures of horse-races and sheep farms in the
copy of the Sydney _Town and Country Journal_ which I had picked up, I
was obliged to tell them that horses were used only in warfare, whilst
sheep were used only as food. Had I spoken about horses as beasts of
burden, and told them what was done with the wool of the sheep, they
would have been quite unable to grasp my meaning, and so I should have
done myself more harm than good. They had ideas of their own about
astronomy; the fundamental "fact" being that the earth was perfectly
flat, the sky being propped up by poles placed at the edges, and kept