The curator had silently melted into the jungle, whence soon appeared the brown glint of sunlight from the tent fly spread over his hammock. A great bag of netting enveloped the latter, and it could be drawn in tight by a string after he had gotten inside. A handful of rockahominy washed down with a drink from his canteen and a bite of grilled bird satisfied him for lunch. After skinning out the paradise birds and hanging them in a row from a line stretched between two trees to keep them from the ants, he disappeared into the jungle on his favorite occupation of studying bird life. Dwight found a bewildering world of new entomology awaiting him. His pickax, net, and magnifying glass were busy every moment, and the boy quivered with excitement, rushing hither and yon through the jungle, now after a leaf-winged butterfly, which would disappear with maddening legerdemain; now stooping to watch a fight between two male _Brenthidæ_, long armored beetles with fighting jaws at the end of a slender proboscis like a spear; now urged to frantic pursuit of the rare horned deer fly. The mystery of the leaf-winged butterfly was solved when he had examined a bush on which it lit more closely. One of the leaves turned out to be the creature itself, with wings folded, motionless on the stem, the under surface of its wings so closely resembling the leaves that only the closest scrutiny could detect the difference. By late afternoon he returned to camp by compass, his box full of new and wonderful insects. “Look at the day’s plunder, Mr. Baldwin!” cried the youth, enthusiastically. He drew out the cork slabs from his carrying tin, covered with the heterogenous collection impaled on pins. “These horned flies are a real find!” exclaimed the curator, interestedly, after examining the butterflies and beetles. “They go to prove a great scientific fact--first propounded as a theory by Mr. Wallace, the English naturalist--that Aru was once part of New Guinea. Those little flies can be explained in no other way. Common in New Guinea, it would be impossible for them to travel the hundred and fifty miles from the New Guinea coast to Aru. To-morrow, if Nicky does not come back, we’ll go on a trip to see another curious phenomenon, the salt-water channels that divide the islands of Aru. They are true rivers, yet have no flow other than the tide at their mouths. How do you explain that, Dwight?” The boy confessed that he could not. “Come to think of it, sir, these are the only islands in the world that _have_ such channels,” he cried out over the novelty of it.