IN TIMOR. 421 



We were now ready for work ; but before beginning in 

 earnest, we decided to take one undisturbed day of rest. It 

 was a delightful holiday of inactivity. We were both 

 enchanted with the outlook from our verandah, whence a 

 single turn of the eyes commanded a wide and varied scene. 

 It would be as useless to attempt as impossible to describe 

 the beauty and our intense enjoyment, of the hourly effects 

 from dawn to twilight, the myriad combinations of the sun- 

 light on the near hills, on the surface of the sea, and on the 

 island peaks of Allor, Kambing, Wetter, whose ridges and 

 crests rising at varying distances caught the sunlight at 

 every angle and in every degree of intensity. We felt that 

 it was well worth not a few privations to live day after day in 

 the face of a scene of such surpassing loveliness. 



My Goa men were both able to shoot, but as neither of them 

 could skin at all well, my ornithological collections got on 

 very slowly, for I myself gave the most of my time to the 

 gathering of plants, which had not been at all carefully collected 

 in Timor, while of the ornithology of the island, Mr. Wallace 

 had already given us the chief features. Though no new 

 birds were shot, those obtained were of great interest to us, 

 especially the kakuak (Philemon timorensis), whose curious 

 bawling cry in the gum-trees was invariably the first to 

 awaken the silence of the dawn and the last to break off at 

 night, and which had the exact habits of its relative which I 

 discovered at Larat (P. timorlaoensis). As there, so here also, 

 a species of Oriole, mimicking it in colour and in form so 

 closely as to be almost indistinguishable when both birds are 

 in the hand, was constantly seen feeding in the same tree with 

 it. That in each of these different islands of the Austro- 

 Malayan region an Oriole should seek protection under the 

 aegis of the habits and strength of this one genus of birds 

 and of no other equally powerful or fleet group, and that in 

 the islands of the neighbouring region, where true Orioles 

 abound, it has not been found to occur, is one of the most 

 curious and remarkable facts in the whole of Natural History. 

 Neopdttacus euteles, a gorgeous little green-and-scarlet parrot, 

 and the fine white cockatoo (Cacatua sulphurea) — the males 

 with black, and the females with red eyes— abounded round 

 our dwelling, and gave us daily great, pleasure by their 



