The Interior. 137 



dozens of silver coins strung round their necks or suspended 

 from their ears. 



As I had moved away from Palembang, I had found the 

 Malay spoken by the common people less and less pure, tiU at 

 length it became quite unintelligible, although the continual 

 recurrence of many well-known words assured me it was a 

 form of Malay, and enabled me to guess at the main subject 

 of conversation. This district had a very bad reputation a 

 few years ago, and travellers were frequently robbed and 

 murdered. Fights between village and village were also of 

 frequent occurrence, and many lives were lost, owing to dis- 

 putes about boundaries or intrigues with women. Now, how- 

 ever, since the country has been divided into districts under 

 " controUeurs," who visit every village in turn to hear com- 

 plaints and settle disputes, such things are no more heard of. 

 This is one of the numerous examples I have met with of the 

 good effects of the Dutch Government. It exercises a strict 

 surveillance over its most distant possessions, establishes a 

 form of government well adapted to the character of the peo- 

 ple, reforms abuses, punishes crimes, and makes itself every- 

 where respected by the native population. 



Lobo Raman is a central point of the east end of Sumatra, 

 being about a hundred and twenty miles from the sea to the 

 east, north, and west. The surface is undulating, with no 

 mountains or even hills, and there is no rock, the soil being 

 generally a red friable clay. Numbers of small streams and 

 rivers intersect the country, and it is pretty equally divided 

 between open clearings and patches of forest, both virgin and 

 second growth, with abundance of fruit-trees ; and there is 

 no lack of paths to get about in any direction. Altogether it 

 is the very country that would promise most for a naturalist, 

 and I feel sure that at a more favorable time of year it would 

 prove exceedingly rich; but it was now the rainy season, 

 when, in the very best of localities, insects are always scarce, 

 and there being no fruit on the trees, there was also a scarci- 

 ty of birds. During a month's collecting, I added only three 

 or four new species to my list of birds, although I obtained 

 very fine specimens of many which were rare and interesting. 

 In butterflies I was rather more successful, obtaining several 

 fine species quite new to me, and a considerable number of 



