Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
little river, and in about an hour we reached the Sultan's house, which I had obtained per-
mission to use. It was situated on the bank of the river, and surrounded by a forest of fruit
trees, among which were some of the very loftiest and most graceful cocoa-nut palms I have
ever seen. It rained nearly all that day, and I could do little but unload and unpack. Towards
the afternoon it cleared up, and I attempted to explore in various directions, but found to my
disgust that the only path was a perfect mud swamp, along which it was almost impossible
to walk, and the surrounding forest so damp and dark as to promise little in the way of in-
sects. I found too on inquiry that the people here made no clearings, living entirely on sago,
fruit, fish, and game; and the path only led to a steep rocky mountain equally impracticable
and unproductive. The next day I sent my men to this hill, hoping 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 veget-
ation, insects are as scarce as in the most barren parts of Europe, and hardly more conspicu-
ous. 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 tol-
erable collecting places,—the road to the coal mines, and the new clearings made by the
Tomōré people, the latter being by far the most productive. I believe the fact to be that in-
sects 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 clear-
ings 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 month than he could
possibly do by a year's search in the depths of the undisturbed forest.
