My Principal Piece Of Furniture Was A Box,
Which Served Me As A Dining Table, A Seat While Skinning Birds,
And as the receptacle of the birds when skinned and dried.
To keep them free from ants we borrowed, with
Somedifficulty, an old
bench, the four legs of which being placed in cocoa-nut shells filled
with water kept us tolerably free from these pests. The box and the
bench were, however, literally the only places where anything could
be put away, and they were generally well occupied by two insect boxes
and about a hundred birds' skins in process of drying. It may therefore
be easily conceived that when anything bulky or out of the common way was
collected, the question "Where is it to be put?" was rather a
difficult one to answer. All animal substances moreover require
some time to dry thoroughly, emit a very disagreeable odour while
doing so, and are particularly attractive to ants, flies, dogs,
rats, cats, and other vermin, calling for special cautions and
constant supervision, which under the circumstances above
described were impossible.
My readers may now partially understand why a travelling
naturalist of limited means, like myself, does so much less than
is expected or than he would himself wish to do. It would be
interesting to preserve skeletons of many birds and animals,
reptiles and fishes in spirits, skins of the larger animals,
remarkable fruits and woods and the most curious articles of
manufacture and commerce; but it will be seen that under the
circumstances I have just described, it would have been impossible
to add these to the collections which were my own more especial
favourites.
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