Bargaining. 427 



for small coin. Every transaction is the subject of a special 

 bargain, and the cause of much talking. It is absolutely nec- 

 essary to offer very little, as the natives are never satisfied till 

 you add a little more. They are then far better pleased than 

 if you had given them twice the amount at first and refused 

 to increase it. 



I, too, was doing a little business, having persuaded some 

 of the natives to collect insects for me ; and when they really 

 found that I gave them most fragrant tobacco for worthless 

 black and green beetles, I soon had scores of visitors, men, 

 women, and children, bringing bamboos full of creeping things, 

 which, alas ! too frequently had eaten each other into frag- 

 ments during the tedium of a day's confinement. Of one 

 grand new beetle, glittering with ruby and emerald tints, I got 

 a large quantity, having first detected one of its wing-cases 

 ornamenting the outside of a native's tobacco-pouch. It was 

 quite a new species, and had not been found elsewhere than 

 on this little island. It is one of the Buprestidae, and has 

 been named Cyphogastra calepyga. 



Each morning after an early breakfast I wandered by my- 

 self into the forest, where I found delightful occupation in 

 capturing the large and handsome butterflies, which were tol- 

 erably abundant, and most of them new to me ; for I was now 

 upon the confines of the Moluccas and New Guinea — a region 

 the productions of which were then among the most precious 

 and rare in the cabinets of Europe. Here my eyes were feast- 

 ed for the first time with splendid scarlet lories on the wing,, 

 as w'ell as by the sight of that most imperial butterfly, the 

 " Priamus " of collectors, or a closely allied species, but flying 

 so high that I did not succeed in capturing a specimen. One 

 of them was brought me in a bamboo, boxed up with a lot of 

 beetles, and of course torn to pieces. The principal draw- 

 back of the place for a collector is the want of good paths, 

 and the dreadfully rugged character of the surface, requiring 

 the attention to be so continually directed to securing a foot- 

 ing as to make it very difiicult to capture active winged 

 things, who pass out of reach while one is glancing to see that 

 the next step may not plunge one into a chasm or over a 

 precipice. Another inconvenience is that there are no running 

 streams, the rock being of so porous a nature that the surface- 



