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 to 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; 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
hastily passing through such a country can at once pick 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 Tomóre 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 it; 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 in much greater abundance where the light is admitted, are so many
attractions to the insects for miles around, and cause a wonderful accumulation
of species and individuals. When the entomologist can discover such a spot, he