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 does more in a mouth than he could possibly do by a year's search in the depths of the undisturbed forest.

The next morning we left early, and reached the mouth of the little river in about au hour. It flows through a perfectly flat alluvial plain, but there are hills which approach it near the mouth. Towards the lower part, in a swamp where the salt-water must enter at high tides, were a number of elegant tree-ferns from eight to fifteen feet high.

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