bank, where the water was fresh and clear, and the owner,
a respectable Batchian Malay, offered me sleeping room
and the use of the verandah if I liked to stay. Seeing
forest all round within a short distance, I accepted his
offer, and the next morning before breakfast walked out to
explore, and on the skirts of the forest captured a few
interesting insects.
Afterwards, I found a path which led for a mile or
more through a very fine forest, richer in palms than
any I had seen in the Moluccas. One pf these especially
attracted my attention from its elegance. The stem was
not thicker than my wrist, yet it was very lofty, and
bore clusters of bright red fruit. It was apparently a
species of Areca. Another of immense height closely
resembled in appearance the Euterpes of South America.
Here also grew the fan-leafed palm, whose small, nearly
entire leaves are used to make the dammar torches, and to
form the water-buckets in universal use. During this
walk I saw near a dozen species of palms, as well as two
or three Pandani different from those of Langundi. There
were also some very fine climbing ferns and true wild
Plantains (Musa), bearing an edible fruit not so large as
one’s thumb, and consisting of a mass of seeds just covered
with pulp and skin. The people assured me they had
tried the experiment of sowing and cultivating this
species, but could not improve it. They probably did not
grow it in sufficient quantity, and did not persevere suffi-
[ciently long.
Batchian i^/an island that would perhaps repay the
researches of a botanist better than any other in the
whole Archipelago. It contains a great variety of surface
and of. soil, abundance of large and small streams,
many of which are navigable for some distance, and there
being no savage inhabitants, every part of it can be visited
with perfect safety. I t possesses gold, copper, and coal,
hot springs and geysers, sedimentary and volcanic rocks
and coralline limestone, alluvial plains, abrupt hills and
lofty mountains, a moist climate, and a grand and luxuriant
forest vegetation.
The few days I stayed here produced me several new
insects, but scarcely any birds. Butterflies and birds are
in fact remarkably scarce in these forests. One may walk
a whole day and not see more than two or three species of
either. In everything but beetles, these eastern islands
are very deficient compared with the western (Java,
Borneo, &c.), and much more so if compared with the
forests of South America, where twenty or thirty species
of butterflies may be caught every day, and on very good
days a hundred, a number we can hardly reach here in
months of unremitting search. In birds there is the same
difference. In most parts- of tropical America we may
always find some species of woodpecker tanager, bush