ping 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
Tomore 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 ther