202 Buackeurn— The Hawaiian Archipelago. 
felt inclined to give the palm for beauty to the Hawaiian scenery. In these land- 
scapes, even where the higher mountains are not to be seen, there is a subtle and 
most fascinating charm, due I think to the peculiar brightness of the colours: the 
sea, often of a more vivid blue than a painter dare place upon his canvas, streaked 
with a broad, snow-white line of foam where the coral-reef disturbs it ; the golden 
sand on the beach gilded with sunshine; the plains rolling backward from the 
shore, with their long, wind-waved grass beneath the feet and their feathery palm- 
branches far above the head ; the many-tinted forest, spread like a glowing carpet 
to the topmost peak over all the hills ; and the sky sometimes almost coppery in its 
splendour. It is perhaps an unjustifiable digression, in a memoir such as this, to 
wander into the subject of Hawaiian landscapes; but it may be excused for the 
possibility of its luring fresh explorers to the islands, who, I am sure, would carry 
away with them as strong an impression of the beauty of the scenery as of the 
interest of the fauna that finds a home in its midst. 
One of the most remarkable features in Hawaiian entomology is the extreme 
rarity of specimens, in comparison of the number of species, the very common 
insects being few indeed, and the rather common ones almost none at all. As 
an instance of this I may mention, that all the specimens taken of that interesting 
brachelytron, Pachycorynus discedens, Sh., occurred in a single decaying stump 
near Honolulu, and that frequent search failed to produce the insect again. I 
could go on to mention many more similar cases of a species turning up once, and 
not again; notin remote localities, but in the very parts that formed my most fre- 
quent collecting ground. It is by no means an unusual thing to pass a morning 
collecting on the mountains (at any rate on those under 3000 feet high), and to 
return home with perhaps two or three specimens secured, and having seen literally 
nothing else except the few most abundant insects. I have frequently spent an 
hour or more sweeping flower-covered herbage, or beating branches of trees over 
an inverted white umbrella, without seeing the sign of a beetle of any kind. My 
experience in this matter agrees with that of previous explorers in the islands of 
the Pacific Ocean, many of whom allude to the extreme paucity of insect life 
there. In M. Fairmaire’s Essai sur les Coléopteres de la Polynésie it is stated 
that M. Vesco had to devote several years to collecting in Tahite and the Marquesas 
Islands before he could amass a hundred species of coleoptera; and after remarking 
on the groups to which these hundred belong, the author adds the observation, that 
the Sandwich Islands produce nearly the same insects in very small quantities. 
Another of the explorers in the Pacific (I am unable this moment to verify 
the quotation) remarks that, in proceeding northwards from Australia, the islands 
become progressively more barren of insect life, those north of the equator being 
almost unworthy of the trouble of exploration. A residence of years on one of the 
most despised groups of islands in Polynesia has undoubtedly enabled me to show 
that such statements depreciate unduly the real state of the case; but it has also 
