has an extreme range of from 72° to 95° F., with a mean of about 80°. At an elevation of 3000 ft. the climate is pleasantly cool; at 13,000 ft. ice forms in the night, but disappears with the heat of the sun. No snow is known certainly to fall, though it is alleged to have been seen from the sea lying on the summits of the Charles Louis range. Fever is very prevalent on the coasts, and even in the interior at 2000 ft. above the sea. Though generally of a mild character, it is persistently recurrent, and slowly saps and wears out the constitution; too often it is virulent and rapidly fatal.
Fauna.—New Guinea shares in the poverty in mammals of the Australian sub-region. Monotremes (2 species) and marsupials (4 families and 44 species) predominate, but are not abundant. Among the latter two genera, Distaechurus and Dorcopsis, are peculiar. A pig (Sus papuensis), a dingo, several species of mice (of which Chiruromys is a peculiar genus), a few squirrels, and a considerable number of Chiroptera (bats) inhabit the country. The island is specially remarkable for the number and beauty of its birds. The most recent lists record over 500 species as found in the Papuan area, and of these between 50 and 60 genera are peculiar to it. The birds of paradise, which are confined to the sub-region, give special celebrity to its fauna. Between 70 and 80 species have already been described, many of them the most gorgeously adorned, and others, such as the Pteridophora albertisi, the most wonderful of feathered creatures. They are absent from the Louisiades, but species occur in the d’Entrecasteaux Islands which have not been seen on the mainland opposite. The zoology of the Bismarck Archipelago is little known. The species of birds so far described from it number 178 (referable to 38 families), of which 74 are peculiar to it, though closely allied to Papuan forms. It contains, however, no Paradiseidae. The Amphibia, to which the sea is a barrier, are almost exclusively of Australian affinities. Turtles and tortoises are plentiful on the coast. Ceratochelys insculpta of the Fly river, a chelonian peculiar to New Guinea, is remarkable in having its nearest affinities (as have the Papuan tortoises) with South American species. Of the lizards, 3 of the 6 species of Varanidae, 16 of the 30 Scincidae, 8 Geckonidae, and 8 out of the 11 Agamidae are peculiar. Salamanders, toads and frogs are numerous, and crocodiles abound. Only 4 genera and 5 species of snakes are peculiar to New Guinea, many of them poisonous. Butterflies, moths and bees are very abundant, the former being remarkable for their size and splendid coloration; but these groups have not been investigated exhaustively enough to afford a correct idea of their number or their true affinities. Although the list of Coleoptera already known is long, it represents only a fraction of the species remaining to be discovered. The land molluscs show relationship with the Indian and the Malayan sub-regions; but many forms have here their centre, and have spread hence into Australia and the Pacific islands.
Flora.—Most of the foreshores of New Guinea are eucalyptus-dotted grass lands; in the interior dense forests prevail to a height of many thousand feet. Vast tracts of the country have been, however, deforested by fire, and these are covered by the tall ineradicable grass, Imperata arundinacea. So far the highest altitudes yet botanically investigated are those of the Owen Stanley range and the mountains in Kaiser Wilhelms Land, but of the flora of the highest range of all—the Charles Louis mountains—nothing is known. The vascular plants already described number about 1500 species. In the low and sub-mountainous lands the flora is a mixture of Malayan, Australian and Polynesian forms. There are, according to Müller, twice as many palms known from New Guinea as from Australia. The alpine flora, beginning at 6000 ft., is specially characterized by its rhododendrons, pines (Araucaria and Libocedrus), and palms, by numerous superb species of Agapetes (Ericaceae), and on the summits by an extraordinary association of species characteristically European (Rubus, Ranunculus, Leontodon, Aspidium), Himalayan, New Zealandian (Veronica), Antarctic and South American (Drymus, Libocedrus). Good pasture grasses are numerous, but pasture lands are limited. The usual tropical food-plants are cultivated. Tobacco has been found growing in the interior, and may be indigenous, as is in some districts the Kava pepper (Piper methysticum). At Dorey a cotton plant (G. vitifolium) grows wild, and is also cultivated.
Natives.—So large an area of New Guinea remains unexplored that it is impossible, except approximately, to state the number of its inhabitants, but probably 600,000 is under rather than over the mark. The people are broken up into numerous isolated tribes differing greatly in feature, colour and language. Ethnically they belong as a whole to the Melanesian division of the Indo-Pacific races. The predominant tribe are the Papuans (q.v.), who are found here in their, greatest racial purity and occupy practically the whole island except its eastern extremity. The New Guinea native is usually of a negroid type with fine physique, but in the Arfak mountains in the north-west, and at points on the west and north coasts and adjacent islands, the very degraded and stunted Karons are found, with hardly the elements of social organization (possibly the aboriginal race unmixed with foreign elements), and resembling the Aetas or Negritos of the Philippines, and other kindred tribes in the Malay Archipelago. On the banks of the Fly river d’Albertis observed at least two widely differing types, those on its upper course bearing some resemblance to the tribes of the eastern coast. Here, wedged in among the ruder Papuans, who reappear at the extremity of the peninsula, a very different-looking people are found, whom competent observers, arguing from appearance, language and customs, assert to be a branch of the fair Polynesian race. But they are obviously of mixed blood. On the west coasts there is a semi-civilization, due to intercourse with Malays and Bugis, who have settled at various points, and carry on the trade with the neighbouring islands, in some of which, while the coast population is Malay or mixed, that of the interior is identical with the people of the mainland of New Guinea. On the west coasts Mahommedan teaching has also some civilizing effect. Many of the tribes at the west end of New Guinea are, at all events in war time, head-hunters, and in the mountains cannibals. Cannibalism, in fact, is practised here and there throughout New Guinea. The frequent hostility and mistrust of strangers are partly due to slave-hunting raids and ill-treatment by traders, but the different tribes vary much in character. Thus in the mountains of the north-west the Karons live by plunder, or by disposal of slaves or bird skins; while their neighbours the Kebars are a peaceful agricultural people. The mountain tribes are usually despised by their coast neighbours, but in the south of west New Guinea the coast people live in perpetual terror of their inland neighbours.
At Humboldt Bay the people are ready to trade, as are the tribes at Astrolabe Bay; here the Russian Miklucho Maclay lived for some time, and was favourably impressed by the natives. Still farther east, the plateaus of the Finisterre ranges are highly cultivated and artificially irrigated by a comparatively fair people. Many tribes in the south-west seem to be migratory. At Princess Marianne Straits tribes much wilder than those farther, west, naked and painted, swarm like monkeys in the trees, the stems of which are submerged at high tide. But the Torres Straits islanders are employed by Europeans in the pearl shell fishery, and are good labourers; and in some of the Kei and Aru Islands the Papuan inhabitants form orderly Christian communities. The people of the south-east peninsula are generally far from ferocious. Englishmen, wandering inland and losing their way, have been found and brought back by them. Their manners are more courteous, their women better treated, than is usual with Papuans, but they show perhaps less ingenuity and artistic taste. Their children, in the mission schools, show much intelligence.
Exploration and Annexation.—Though probably sighted by Antonio d’Abreu, 1511, New Guinea was apparently first visited either by the Portuguese Don Jorge de Meneses, driven on his way from Goa to Ternate in 1526 to take shelter at “Isla Versija" (which has been identified with Warsia, a place on the N.W. coast, but may possibly be the island of Waigeu), or by the Spaniard Alvaro de Saavedra two years later. The name of “New Guinea” was probably given by Ortiz de Retez, or Roda, who in 1546 first laid down several points along the north coast. In the same and the two following centuries, though the coasts were visited by many illustrious navigators, as Willem Schouten and Jacob Lemaire, Abel Tasman, William Dampier, L. V. de Torres, L. A. de Bougainville and James Cook, little additional knowledge was gained. This was due first to the difficulties of the navigation, next to the exclusiveness of the Dutch, who, holding the Spice Islands, prevented all access to places east of them, and lastly to the stream of enterprise being latterly diverted to the more temperate regions farther south. The Dutch barrier was broken down by the arrival of Dampier and other “interlopers” from the east, and of emissaries from the (English) East India Company in search of spice-bearing lands. The voyage of Thomas Forrest (1774) in the “Tartar galley” of 10 tons, and his account of New Guinea (Voyage to New Guinea and the Moluccas, London, 1780), are still full of interest. New Guinea was actually annexed in 1793 by two commanders in the East India Company’s service, and the island of Manasvari in Geelvink Bay was held for some months by their troops. After the peace of 1815 Dutch surveying expeditions to the west coasts became numerous, and in later times scientific explorers penetrated many of the unknown parts of Dutch New Guinea, such as A. R. Wallace (1856–1863), Odoardo Beccari (1871, 1875 and 1876), and Maria d’Albertis (1871–1878). Important expeditions were those of P. van der Crab, J. E. Teysmann, J. G. Coorengel, A. J. Langeveldt van Hemert and P. Swaan, undertaken for the Netherlands Indian government 1871–1872, 1875–1876 (reports published at The Hague in 1879); and of C. B. H. von Rosenberg in the Geelvink Bay districts in 1869–1870 (report published at The Hague in 1875). Subsequently to the visits of J. A. d’Entrecasteaux (1793) and Dumont d’Urville (1827–1840), the eastern coasts were surveyed by Captains F. P. Blackwood (1835),
