344 THE ARU ISLANDS. [chap. 



or collecting-stick, scarcely a single pure bred Papuan was to be 

 seen at Dobbo. Chinese and Malays of various tribes were the 

 chief inhabitants, and in the stores of the former we managed to 

 pick up a few skins of P. apoda in fairly good condition, but there 

 was nothing except these to interest the traveller — naturalist or 

 otherwise — who cared to penetrate the gloomy, Chinaman-perfumed 

 interiors of the huts. Every building in Dobbo is a store, if we 

 except two or three little mosques or chapels near the landward 

 end of the village — quaint little edifices built of attap, and with a 

 sort of box in the centre, covered with a white cotton canopy, much 

 like a Datu's tomb in Sulu, Here everybody, no matter of what 

 religion, makes his prayers before departmg on his homeward 

 voyage. A little farther towards the forest was the graveyard, 

 over which spot the pretty Brush -tongued Lories {Trichoglossus 

 nigrigularis) passed every night at sunset, their line as unvarying 

 as that of ducks at flight-time. 



Achi, an excellent boy whom we had brought from Malacca, 

 collected daily for us in the forest, and usually returned with his 

 satchel full of pill-boxes, each tenanted by a creature or creatures 

 unknown. The opening of these was, I confess, somewhat of an 

 ordeal to me. Within might be some harmless and lovely butterfly, 

 but the occupant was quite as likely to be a formidable centipede 

 six or eight inches in length, or some great spider carrying about 

 with it, beneath the abdomen, a disc-shaped egg-case as large as a 

 shilling. The adventures we met with in disposing of our captures 

 were numberless, and after a few of them I found it quite unneces- 

 sary to caution anybody against opening any stray pill-box they 

 might come across. 



The magnificent bird-winged butterfly, known, I believe, to 

 entomologists as Ornithoptera arruana — an animated emerald some 

 seven inches across — was apparently abundant in Aru, and Achi 

 brought in four nearly uninjured specimens one morning. We 

 were also fortunate in getting many pupte of these exquisite 

 creatures. I discovered that it was necessary to suspend these in 



