LIBRARY 



NEW YORK 



BOTANICAL, 



EDITOR'S PREFACE 



TO naturalists generally, but especially to botanists, the author 

 of the following pages stands in no need of introduction. 

 His work in Borneo, which he here describes, was but the prelude to 

 many years of travel and exploration which have found expression, 

 in so far as regards their scientific results, in the pages of various 

 Societies' publications, and the shelves and drawers of the great 

 museums of Italy and other countries — a monument alike to the 

 author's botanical and zoological knowledge and his tireless zeal 

 as a collector. But while his name is thus familiar to the student of 

 science, notably to those who have made the fauna and flora of the 

 Eastern Archipelago a special subject of research, it is probably 

 less so to what an old translator once contemptuously described as 

 " the mere English reader," or — as it would nowadays be phrased — 

 the man in the street. To the latter it is only necessary to say that 

 no one is more fully qualified to act as guide to the great island 

 amidst whose primeval forests he wandered for so long. Whether 

 the scientific reader does or does not admit the validity of all 

 Dr. Beccari's theories concerning species-formation, he cannot call 

 in question his abundant experience of the country, or his know- 

 ledge of the subjects of which he treats. 



Dr. Beccari tells us that nearly forty years have passed away since 

 the days of which he writes, and deems an apology necessary for 

 so lengthy a hesitation. Certainly, in these days of " steam and 

 speed," a forty-year-old description of a country might seem to a 

 hasty thinker something more than a little out of date. Were he 

 to reject the volume on these grounds, his conclusion would be an 

 erroneous one, and he would miss not a little. These vast primeval 

 groves, through which the author will guide him so pleasantly, 

 secure from mosquito's bite and equatorial temperatures, are to-day 

 as they have been from almost the beginning of things. The 

 stupendous trees which form them have turned from seedling to 

 mould for aeons not to be numbered. Beneath the shade of their 

 predecessors the common ancestors of Man and Mayas may have 

 wandered ; and though change is touching even the unchanging East, 

 and there are such things as volcanoes to be reckoned with, the 

 end o£~the Bornean forest is not, as yet, within sight. It is with 

 naturferather than man that Dr. Beccari deals, and nature needs 

 something more than a generation to get out of date. For those 



St ix 



