Although I Never Afterwards Found So Many Large And Handsome Beetles As In Borneo, Yet I Obtained Here A Great Variety Of Species.

For the first two or three weeks, while I was searching out the best localities, I took about 30 different kinds of beetles n day, besides about half that number of butterflies, and a few of the other orders.

But afterwards, up to the very last week, I averaged 49 species a day. On the 31st of May, I took 78 distinct sorts, a larger number than I had ever captured before, principally obtained among dead trees and under rotten bark. A good long walk on a fine day up the hill, and to the plantations of the natives, capturing everything not very common that came in my way, would produce about 60 species; but on the last day of June I brought home no less than 95 distinct kinds of beetles, a larger number than I ever obtained in one day before or since. It was a fine hot day, and I devoted it to a search among dead leaves, beating foliage, and hunting under rotten bark, in all the best stations I had discovered during my walks. I was out from ten in the morning till three in the afternoon, and it took me six hours' work at home to pin and set out all the specimens, and to separate the species. Although T had already been working this shot daily for two months and a half, and had obtained over 800 species of Coleoptera, this day's work added 32 new ones. Among these were 4 Longicorns, 2 Caribidae, 7 Staphylinidae, 7 Curculionidae, 2 Copridae, 4 Chrysomelidae, 3 Heteromera, 1 Elates, and 1 Buprestis. Even on the last day I went out, I obtained 10 new species; so that although I collected over a thousand distinct sorts of beetles in a space not much exceeding a square mile during the three months of my residence at Dorey, I cannot believe that this represents one half the species really inhabiting the same spot, or a fourth of what might be obtained in an area extending twenty miles in each direction.

On the 22d of July the schooner Hester Helena arrived, and five days afterwards we bade adieu to Dorey, without much regret, for in no place which I have visited have I encountered more privations and annoyances. Continual rain, continual sickness, little wholesome food, with a plague of ants and files, surpassing anything I had before met with, required all a naturalist's ardour to encounter; and when they were uncompensated by great success in collecting, became all the more insupportable. This long thought-of and much-desired voyage to New Guinea had realized none of my expectations. Instead of being far better than the Aru Islands, it was in almost everything much worse. Instead of producing several of the rarer Paradise birds, I had not even seen one of them, and had not obtained any one superlatively fine bird or insect.

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