of silver coins strung round their necks or suspended from
their ears.
As I had moved away from Palembang, I had found the
Malay spoken by the common people less and less pure,
till at length it became quite unintelligible, although the
continual recurrence of many well-known words assured
me it was a form of Malay, and enabled me to guess at
the main subject of conversation. This district had a
very bad reputation a few years ago, and travellers were
frequently robbed and murdered. Fights between village
and village were also of frequent occurrence, and many
lives were lost, owing to disputes about boundaries or
intrigues with women. How, however, since the country
has been divided into districts under “ Controlleurs,” who
visit every village in turn to hear complaints and settle
disputes, such things are no more heard of. This is one of
the numerous examples I have met with of the good effects
of the Dutch Government. It exercises a strict surveillance
over its most distant possessions, establishes a form
of government well adapted to the character of the people,
reforms abuses, punishes crimes, and makes itself everywhere
respected by the native population.
Lobo Eaman is a central point of the east end of
Sumatra, being about a hundred and twenty miles from
the sea to the east, north, and west. The surface is
undulating, with no mountains or even hills, and there is
no rock, the soil being generally a red fnable clay.
Numbers of small streams and rivers intersect the country,
and it is pretty equally divided between open clearings
and patches of forest, both virgin and second growth, with
abundance of fruit trees; and there is no lack of paths to
get about in any direction. Altogether it is the very
country that would promise most for a naturalist, and
I feel sure that at a more favourable time of year it would
prove exceedingly rich ; but it was now the rainy season,
when, in the very best of localities, insects are always
acarce, and there being no fruit on the trees there was
also a scarcity of birds. During a month’s collecting, I
added only three or four new species to my list of birds,
although I obtained very fine specimens of many which
were rare and interesting. In butterflies I was rather
more successful, obtaining several fine species quite new to
me, and a considerable number of very rare and beautiful
insects. I will give here some account of two species of
butterflies, which, though very common in collections, present
us with peculiarities of the highest interest.
The first is the handsome Papilio memnon, a splendid
butterfly of a deep black colour, dotted over with lines and
groups of scales of a clear ashy blue. Its wings are five
inches in expanse, and the hind wings are rounded, with
scalloped edges. This applies to the males; but the females
are very different, and vary so much that they were once