Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
that, by similar arrangements, I might in every island be able to obtain abundance of these
insects; but, strange to say, during the six succeeding years I was never once able to make
any collections at all approaching those at Saráwak. The reason of this I can pretty well un-
derstand to be owing to the absence of some one or other essential condition that were here
all combined. Sometimes the dry season was the hindrance; more frequently residence in a
town or village not close to virgin forest, and surrounded by other houses whose lights were
a counter-attraction; still more frequently residence in a dark palm-thatched house, with a
lofty roof, in whose recesses every moth was lost the instant it entered. This last was the
greatest drawback, and the real reason why I never again was able to make a collection of
moths; for I never afterwards lived in a solitary jungle-house with a low boarded and white-
washed verandah, so constructed as to prevent insects at once escaping into the upper part of
the house, quite out of reach. After my long experience, my numerous failures, and my one
success, I feel sure that if any party of naturalists ever make a yacht-voyage to explore the
Malayan Archipelago, or any other tropical region, making entomology one of their chief
pursuits, it would well repay them to carry a small framed verandah, or a verandah-shaped
tent of white canvas, to set up in every favourable situation, as a means of making a collec-
tion of nocturnal Lepidoptera, and also of obtaining rare specimens of Coleoptera and other
insects. I make the suggestion here, because no one would suspect the enormous difference
in results that such an apparatus would produce; and because I consider it one of the curios-
ities of a collector's experience to have found out that some such apparatus is required.
When I returned to Singapore I took with me the Malay lad named Ali, who subsequently
accompanied me all over the Archipelago. Charles Allen preferred staying at the Mission-
house, and afterwards obtained employment in Saráwak and in Singapore, till he again
joined me four years later at Amboyna in the Moluccas.
