ties of rattan (which resembles in these respects wire
rather than cordage), makes me believe that a vessel carefully built
in this manner is actually stronger and safer than one fastened in the
ordinary way with nails.

During our stay here we were all very busy. Our captain was daily
superintending the completion of his two small praus. All day long
native boats were coming with fish, cocoa-nuts, parrots and lories,
earthen pans, sirip leaf, wooden bowls, and trays, &c. &e., which every
one of the fifty inhabitants of our prau seemed to be buying on his own
account, till all available and most unavailable space of our vessel
was occupied with these miscellaneous articles: for every man on board
a prau considers himself at liberty to trade, and to carry with him
whatever he can afford to buy.

Money is unknown and valueless here--knives, cloth, and arrack forming
the only medium of exchange, with tobacco for small coin. Every
transaction is the subject of a special bargain, and the cause of much
talking. It is absolutely necessary to offer very little, as the natives
are never satisfied till you add a little more. They are then far better
pleased than if you had given them twice the amount at first and refused
to increase it.

I, too, was doing a little business, having persuaded some of the
natives to collect insects for me; and when they really found that I
gave them most fragrant tobacco for worthless black and green beetles, I
soon had scores of visitors, men, women, and children, bringing bamboos
full of creeping things, which, alas! too frequently had eaten each
other into fragments during the tedium of a day's confinement. Of one
grand new beetle, glittering with ruby and emerald tints, I got a large
quantity, having first detected one of its wing-cases ornamenting the
outside of a native's tobacco pouch. It was quite a new species, and had
not been found elsewhere than on this little island. It is one of the
Buprestidae, and has been named Cyphogastra calepyga.

Each morning after an early breakfast I wandered by myself into the
forest, where I found delightful occupation in capturing the large and
handsome butterflies, which were tolerably abundant, and most of them
new to me; for I was now upon the confines of the Moluccas and New
Guinea,--a region the productions of which were then among the most
precious and rare in the cabinets of Europe. Here my eyes were feasted
for the first time with splendid scarl