Judging from the height and size of these trees, I doubt whether the right bank of the Livingstone at the mouth of the Lowwa river was ever at any time inhabited. An impenetrable undergrowth consisting of a heterogeneous variety of ferns, young palms, date, doum, _Raphia vinifera_, and the _Mucuna pruriens_—the dread of the naked native for the tenacity with which its stinging sharp-pointed bristles attach themselves to the skin—masses of the capsicum plant, a hundred species of clambering vines, caoutchouc creepers, llianes, and endless lengths of rattan-cane intermeshed and entangled, was jealously sheltered from sunlight by high, over-arching, and interlacing branches of fine grey- stemmed Rubiaceæ, camwood and bombax, teak, elais palms, ficus, with thick fleshy leaves, and tall gum-trees. Such is the home of the elephants which through this undergrowth have trodden the only paths available. In the forks of trees were seen large lumps, a spongy excrescence which fosters orchids and tender ferns, and from many of the branches depended the Usneæ moss in graceful and delicate fringes. Along the brown clayey shores, wherever there is the slightest indentation in the banks and still water, were to be found the Cyperaceæ sedge, and in deeper recesses and shallow water the papyrus. In such cool, damp localities as the low banks near the confluence of these two important streams, entomologists might revel. The Myriapedes, with their lengthy sinuous bodies of bright shiny chocolate or deep black colour, are always one of the first species to attract one’s attention. Next come the crowded lines of brown, black, or yellow ants, and the termites, which, with an insatiable appetite for destruction, are ever nibbling, gnawing, and prowling. If the mantis does not arrest the eye next, it most assuredly will be an unctuous earth caterpillar, with its polished and flexible armour, suggestive of slime and nausea. The mantis among insects is like the python among serpents. Its strange figure, trance-like attitudes, and mysterious ways have in all countries appealed to the imagination of the people. Though sometimes five inches in length, its waist is only about the thickness of its leg. Gaunt, weird, and mysterious in its action, it is as much a wonder among insects as a mastodon would be in a farmyard. The ladybird attracts the careless eye, as it slowly wanders about, by its brilliant red, spotted with black—but if I were to enter into details of the insect life I saw within the area of a square foot, an entire chapter might readily be filled. But to write upon the natural wonders of the tropics seems nowadays almost superfluous; it is so well understood that in these humid shades the earth seethes with life, that in these undrained recesses the primitive laboratory of nature is located, for disturbing which the unacclimatised will have to pay the bitter penalty of malarial fever.