all shifted, etc.; many were saved, but some were entirely spoiled.
28th. We have ever since we have been here observed the nests of a kind of ant, much like the white ant in the East Indies, but to us perfectly harmless: they were always pyramidal, from a few inches to six feet in height, and very much resembled the Druidical monuments which I have seen in England. To-day we met with a large number of them of all sizes ranged in a small open place, which had a very pretty effect. Dr. Solander compared them to the runic stones on the plains of Upsala in Sweden; myself to all the smaller Druidical monuments I had seen.
1st July. Our second lieutenant found the husk of a cocoanut full of barnacles cast up on the beach;[1] it had probably come from some island to windward.
2nd. The wild plantain trees, though their fruit does not serve for food, are to us of a most material benefit. We made baskets of their stalks (a thing we had learned from the islanders), in which our plants, which would not otherwise keep, have remained fresh for two or three days; indeed, in a hot climate it is hardly practicable to manage without such baskets, which we call by the island name of papa mija. Our plants dry better in paper books than in sand, with the precaution that one person is entirely employed in attending them. He shifts them all once a day, exposes the quires in which they are to the greatest heat of the sun, and at night covers them most carefully up from any damp, always being careful, also, not to bring them out too soon in the morning, or leave them out too late in the evening.
3rd. The pinnace, which had been sent out yesterday in search of a passage, returned to-day, having found a way by which she passed most of the shoals that we could see, but not all. This passage was also to windward of us, so that we could only hope to get there by the assistance of a land breeze, of which we have had but one since we lay in the
- ↑ The absence of the cocoanut palm on the Australian coasts is one of the most singular facts in botanical geography.
