Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 1 (1897).djvu/327

Rh Vieill., these latter being remarkably tame, and allowing themselves to be approached within four or five yards.

Lizards were fairly numerous, both in the open and under the blocks of coralline limestone, but I did not see more than three or four kinds. Of these, the most remarkable was a dark grey, rather spiny species, sometimes nearly a foot in length, with an exceedingly long tail (Amphibolurus barbatus). This was by no means rare, and, although active enough, was so tame, or rather so stupid, as to be caught without the slightest difficulty. A little red-headed Lizard, which I had frequently seen on the islands off the north-west coast of Australia, was, on the contrary, as nimble and wary as these creatures usually are, and I could not succeed in securing a specimen. Under the stones I found a very curious "Gecko," Phyllodactylus marmoratus, with a thick carrot-shaped tail, suddenly constricted at the base. The wind was too strong for insects to be moving freely, but I found a good many small but interesting beetles, chiefly by searching in the sand at the roots of the bent-grass. Numbers of land-shells, all of minute size and mostly dead, were strewn about in hollows among the sand-hills; they principally consisted of several species of Pupa (three of which, P. contraria, Sm., P. wallabyensis, Sm., and P. mooreana, Sm., were undescribed), with a little Truncatella found abundantly near the shore, where it was accompanied by many weathered shells of the well-known and widely distributed Spirula australis.

The wind had gone down somewhat on the next day (17th), but not sufficiently so as to induce us to leave our anchorage; and a party of five officers, including myself, left the ship after an early breakfast to spend a day on the island. We hauled our boat up on a sandy beach, on which I found numerous specimens of a pretty little weevil of the family Cossonidæ under the heaps of Zostera; and then each went his own way, my messmates to shoot, and I to look for insects, or anything else that might turn up. By keeping under the lee of the high sandy banks next the sea, where the sun was hot and the breeze was not so much felt as elsewhere, I soon found some butterflies on the wing. These were of two species only—a little "blue" (Lycæna sp.), and a very pretty little "skipper," in appearance recalling our British Cyclopides paniscus on the upper side, and handsomely marked