The jungle of the mainland of Aru came down to the very water’s edge. A narrow strip of sandy beach, lined with nodding palms, was strewn with fallen trees, bare and sun dried, and whole colonies of hermit crabs on the beach told of the teeming life of tropical nature pushed to the very verge of the sea. Their party landed from the village key of old coral growth, and stepped ashore at the end of a native path that was a mere tunnel through the undergrowth. Never had they seen palms in such profusion or so tall and magnificent, the bare trunks rising through lesser growths a hundred feet high, where the great fronds of leaves spread green umbrellas far overhead. The tree ferns, their first in this Papuan land, rose feathery and beautiful, with stems thirty feet high, above which shot up the lacy fronds, giant replicas of our northern hot-house varieties. The ubiquitous banana was everywhere, growing wild in the forest, generally in the open glades of pandanus palms, whose scraggly trees twisted high in the misty air, with spikes of leaves like century plants at their branch tips. And every now and then, through the dim vistas of vine and creeper, they could note a dense thicket where a giant fig tree grew, surrounded by its own forest of aërial root shoots a hundred feet in diameter. Down on the jungle floor scuttled millions of silent hermit crabs, or great orange-and-red land crabs popped down their holes. One had but to look an instant to realize that the jungle was alive with lizards, black, green, and gray, all motionless on limb or root, staring at the explorers with bright beady eyes--to flash into a green streak of movement at the first motion to catch them. It was early, with the faint light of dawn hardly penetrating the green depths all about them as they went silently along in single file, listening to the chorus of bird life in the tree tops. The shrill scream of lories and parakeets, the hoarse cry of the tree pigeons, and the incessant chirrup of smaller birds awoke the jungle with the voices of the bird world. Then the sun shot up in a flaming fire into the pale tropical heavens, and its rays lit up the glades, showing huge yellow-and-black spiders on thick ropy webs swung in every open spot, and gorgeous butterflies in metallic blues and greens sailing through the sunlit vistas, causing many a stop and chase. A cry rang startlingly through the tree tops. “Wawk! Wawk! Wawk!--Wok, wok wok!” it said, remarkably like the caw of our northern crow. The curator stopped and listened, his hand to ear to locate the direction of the sound. “The great bird of paradise, boys!” he exclaimed, exultingly. “Why, it sounds exactly like a crow flying through our home woods!” cried Dwight. “Sure! It’s the tropical crow. They all belong to the crow family, only this is what Nature can do with the crow when you give her plenty of heat and sunlight!” retorted the curator. “There he goes again, off to the left!”