we entered the little river, and in about an hour we
reached the Sultan’s house, which I had obtained permission
to use. It was situated on the bank of the river,
and surrounded by a forest of fruit trees, among which
were some of the very loftiest and most graceful cocoa-nut
palms I have ever seen. It rained nearly all that day,
and I could do little but unload and unpack. Towards
the afternoon it cleared up, and I attempted to explore in
Various directions, but found to my disgust that the only
path was a perfect mud swamp, along which it was almost
impossible to walk, and the surrounding forest so damp
and dark as tc promise little in the way of insects. I
found too on inquiry that the people here made no clearings,
living entirely on sago, fruit, fish, and game ; and the
path only led to a steep rocky mountain equally impracticable
and unproductive. The next day I sent my men
to this hill, hoping it might produce some good birds j but
they returned with only two common species, and I myself
had been able to get nothing, every little track I had
attempted to- follow leading to a dense sago swamp, I
saw that I should waste time by staying here, and determined
to' leave the following day.
This is one of those spots so hard for the European
naturalist to conceive, where with all the riches of a
tropical vegetation, and partly perhaps from the very
luxuriance of that vegetation, insects are as scarce as in
the most barren parts of Europe, and hardly more conspicuous.
In temperate climates there is a tolerable
uniformity in the distribution of insects over those parts
of a country in which there is a similarity in the vegetation,
any deficiency being easily accounted for by the
absence of wood or uniformity of surface. The traveller
K hastily passing through such a country can at once pick
I out a collecting ground which will afford him a fair
notion of its entomology. Here the case is different.
There are certain requisites of a good collecting ground
which can only be ascertained to exist by some days’
search in the vicinity of each village. In some places
there is no virgin forest, as at Djilolo and Sahoe; in
others there are no open pathways or clearings, as here.
| At Batchian there are only two tolerable collecting places,
—the road to the coal mines, and the new clearings made
by the Tomor^ people, the latter being by far the most
productive. I believe the fact to be that insects are pretty
uniformly distributed over these countries (where the
forests have not been cleared away), and are so scarce in
any one spot that searching for them is almost useless.
If the forest is all cleared away, almost all the insects
disappear with i t ; but when small clearings and paths are
made, the fallen trees in various stages of drying and
decay, the rotting leaves, the loosening bark and the fungoid
growths upon it, together with the flowers that appear