XX] LONDON : VOYAGE TO SINGAPORE 327 



the Royal Geographical Society, and one of the most accessible 

 and kindly of men of science. On calling upon him and stating 

 my wishes, he at once agreed to make an application on my 

 behalf for a passage to some Malayan port, and as he was 

 personally known to many members of the Government and 

 had great influence with them, a passage was promised me on 

 the first ship going to those seas. This was, I think, near the 

 end of the year 1853, when I had published my two books, 

 and had spent much of my spare time at the British Museum, 

 examining the collections, and making notes and sketches, 

 of the rarer and more valuable species of birds, butterflies, 

 and beetles of the various Malay islands. 



Among the greatest wants of a collector who wishes to 

 know what he is doing, and how many of his captures are 

 new or rare, are books containing a compact summary with 

 brief descriptions of all the more important known species ; 

 and, speaking broadly, such books did not then nor do now 

 exist. Having found by my experience when beginning 

 botany how useful are even the shortest characters in deter- 

 mining a great number of species, I endeavoured to do the 

 same thing in this case. I purchased the " Conspectus Generum 

 Avium " of Prince Lucien Bonaparte, a large octavo volume 

 of 800 pages, containing a well-arranged catalogue of all 

 the known species of birds up to 1850, with references to 

 descriptions and figures, and the native country and distribu- 

 tion of each species. Besides this, in a very large number — I 

 should think nearly half — a short but excellent Latin descrip- 

 tion was given, by which the species could be easily deter- 

 mined. In many families (the cuckoos and woodpeckers, for 

 example) every species was thus described, in others a large 

 proportion. As the book had very wide margins I consulted 

 all the books referred to for the Malayan species, and copied 

 out in abbreviated form such of the characters as I thought 

 would enable me to determine each, the result being that 

 during my whole eight years' collecting in the East, I could 

 almost always identify every bird already described, and if 

 I could not do so, was pretty sure that it was a new or 

 undescribed species. 



