4:48 The Aru Islands. 



on any other species of the eight thousand different birds that 

 are known to exist upon the earth ; and, combined with the 

 most exquisite beauty of plumage, render this one of the most 

 perfectly lovely of the many lovely productions of nature. 

 My transports of admiration and delight quite amused my Aru 

 hosts, who saw nothing more in the " burong raja" than ■we 

 do in the robin or the goldfinch.' 



Thus one of my objects in coming to the far East was ac- 

 complished. I had obtained a specimen of the King Bird of 

 Paradise (Paradisea regia), which had been described by Lin- 

 naeus from skins preserved in a mutilated state by the natives. 

 I knew how few Europeans had ever beheld the perfect little 

 organism I now gazed upon, and how very imperfectly it was 

 still known in Europe. The emotions excited in the minds of 

 a naturalist who has long desired to see the actual thing which 

 he has hitherto known only by description, drawing, or badly- 

 preserved external covering, especially Avhen that thing is of 

 surpassing rarity and beauty, require ihe poetic faculty fully 

 to express them. The remote island in which I found myself 

 situated,, in an almost unvisited sea, far from the tracks of 

 merchant-fleets and navies ; the wild luxuriant tropical forest, 

 which stretched far away on every side ; the rude uncultured 

 savages who gathered round me — aU had their influence in 

 determining the emotions with which I gazed upon this " thing 

 of beauty." I thought of the long ages of the past, during 

 Avhich the successive generations of this little creature had run 

 their course — year by year being born, and living and dying 

 amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to 

 gaze upon their loveliness — to all appearance such a wanton 

 waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy. It 

 seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should 

 live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild 

 inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless 

 barbarism ; while on the other hand, should civilized man ever 

 reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and 

 physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may 

 be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of 

 organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, 

 and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonder- 



' See the upper figure on Plate VIII. at commencement of Chap. XXXVIII. 



