AUTHOR'S [UNFINISHED] 

 INTRODUCTION 



THIS book is the veriest hotch-potch of notes and 

 observations plucked from my journals and my memory, 

 together with a few extracts from scientific periodicals. 

 I have striven to weld the mass into a continuous and 

 symmetrical whole, but can hardly flatter myself that 

 I have succeeded. It appears to me that there is a small 

 but increasing section of the reading public that describes 

 itself as taking an interest in Natural History, and it is to 

 this section that I appeal for a verdict on the merits of 

 the book. This public reads popular works on Natural 

 History but not scientific journals, and yet in the volumes 

 of the latter are concealed amid a mass of technical and 

 arid detail facts and observations of the greatest interest 

 to all lovers of Nature. I have not hesitated to disinter 

 these facts whenever they relate to Bornean Natural 

 History and to interpolate them in my own story, but 

 I have been careful to acknowledge the sources from 

 which they are drawn, and I trust that by dressing them 

 up for popular consumption I have neither spoilt nor 

 altered their flavour. A comprehensive work dealing 

 with the realm of Nature in Borneo is not the labour 

 of one man but of many, not the outcome of observation 

 extending over seven years but over seventy times seven, 

 and this book pretends to be little more than a presenta- 



