Wallace and the Dutch East 51 



A?72bonsche Rariteitkamer, published in 1705, first made 

 known to the world the natural wonders of the Moluccas. 



A queer old hermit of a Frenchman lived up in the 

 forest not far from where Rumphius was buried. He made 

 a precarious livelihood selling natural-history objects to 

 museums hither and yon. We got a lot of interesting things 

 from him, including a fine batch of cocoons of the local 

 bird-winged butterfly, a giant species, black and metallic 

 velvety green, related to one we had taken in New Guinea 

 and which flew so high, here in Amboina, that we had no 

 luck collecting specimens. We pinned up the cocoons in a 

 vacant stateroom, separate from such others as we had 

 secured so that there would be no mixing of localities, 

 and long before we were back in Java they had emerged 

 and are all now safely pinned out in the collection here in 

 Cambridge. 



There was a cave in the hills not far from this same spot. 

 This yielded a few bats of families poorly represented in 

 American collections. But the exciting high light of our 

 visit to Amboina was, of all things, an eel. In 1887 the 

 Reverend B. G. Snow sent some fishes to the Agassiz Mu- 

 seum from Ebon in the Marshall Islands. Amongst these 

 was a single specimen of an extraordinary eel with curious 

 extensions to its nostrils like folded leaves sticking far out 



He worked on, helped by friends, and finally died on the fif- 

 teenth of June 1702. He left two great manuscripts, the one I 

 have mentioned and the Herbarmm Amboinense, neither of 

 which was published until after his death. Rumphius was one 

 of the great naturalists of the seventeenth century and he de- 

 serves to be better known. Sarton's brief account of his life 

 was written in his for August 1937, and a longer and a more - 

 elaborate biography will some day be forthcoming. ^v 



