Most
Unfortunately, However, He Was Seized With A Terrible Fever On
His Arrival At Coti, And, After Lying There Some Weeks, Was Taken
To Singapore In A Very Bad Condition, Where He Arrived After I
Had Left For England.
When he recovered he obtained employment in
Singapore, and I lost his services as a collector.
The three concluding chapters of my work will treat of the birds
of Paradise, the Natural History of the Papuan (stands, and the
Races of Man in the Malay Archipelago.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE BIRDS OF PARADISE.
AS many of my journeys were made with the express object of
obtaining specimens of the Birds of Paradise, and learning
something of their habits and distribution; and being (as far as
I am aware) the only Englishman who has seen these wonderful
birds in their native forests, and obtained specimens of many of
them, I propose to give here, in a connected form, the result of
my observations and inquiries.
When the earliest European voyagers reached the Moluccas in
search of cloves and nutmegs, which were then rare and precious
spices, they were presented with the dried shins of birds so
strange and beautiful as to excite the admiration even of those
wealth-seeking rovers. The Malay traders gave them the name of
"Manuk dewata," or God's birds; and the Portuguese, finding that
they had no feet or wings, and not being able to learn anything
authentic about then, called them "Passaros de Col," or Birds of
the Sun; while the learned Dutchmen, who wrote in Latin, called
them "Avis paradiseus," or Paradise Bird.
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