mployment 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 Islands, 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. John van Linschoten
gives these names in 1598, and tells us that no one has seen these birds
alive, for they live in the air, always turning towards the sun, and
never lighting on the earth till they die; for they have neither feet
nor wings, as, he adds, may be seen by the birds carried to India, and
sometimes to Holland, but being very costly they were then rarely seen
in Europe. More than a hundred years later Mr. William Funnel, who
accompanied Dampier, and wrote an account of the voyage, saw specimens
at Amboyna, and was told that they came to Banda to eat nutmegs, which
intoxicated them and made them fall down senseless, when they were
killed by ants. Down to 1760, when Linnaeus named the largest species,
Paradisea apoda (the footless Paradise Bird), no perfect specimen had
been seen in Europe, and absolutely nothing was known about them. And
even now, a hundred years later, most books state that they migrate
annually to Ternate, Banda, and Amboyna; whereas the fact is, that they
are as completely unknown in those islands in a wild state as they are
in England. Linnaeus was also acquainted with a small species, which he
named Paradisea r