Natural-History Collectors, 6409 



nothing of the details of the houses between you and the western sky, 

 nor could you recognize any one a few paces distant. 



(To be continued.) 



Extracts from a Letter o/Mr. A. R. Wallace to Mr. S. Stevens. 



Ternate, September 2, 1858. — When I arrived here from New 

 Guinea, about a fortnight ago, I found your two letters of January and 

 March, noting the safe arrival of the Am collections and the advan- 

 tageous disposal of the birds : they gave me the greatest pleasure and 

 satisfaction, and the interest the collections appear to have excited 

 was a great encouragement to me ; and I assure you I stood in need 

 of some encouragement, for never have I made a voyage so disagree- 

 able, expensive and unsatisfactory as the one now completed. I 

 suffered greatly from illness and bad or insufficient food, and am only 

 now just sufficiently recovered to work hard at cleaning and packing 

 my collections : my servants suffered as much as myself; two or three 

 were always sick, and one of my hunters died of dysentery. My col- 

 lections will greatly disappoint you and my other friends, — more than 

 they do myself, — because you will be expecting something superior to 

 Aru, whereas they are very inferior in fine things. First and foremost, 

 all my hopes of getting the rare paradise birds have vanished, for not 

 only could I get none myself, but could not even purchase a single 

 native skin 1 and that in Dorey, where Lesson purchased abundance 

 of almost all the species : he must have been there at a lucky time, 

 when there was an accumulated stock, and I at a most unpropitious 

 one. It is certain, however, that all but the two common yellow spe- 

 cies are very rare, even in the places where the natives get them, for 

 you may see hundreds of the common species to perhaps one of either 

 of the rarer sorts. There are some eight or ten places where most of 

 the birds are got, and from each I doubt if there is more on the 

 average than one specimen per annum of any other than the Paradisea 

 papuana ; so that a person might be several years in the country, and 

 yet not get half the species even from the natives: yet they are all 

 common in Europe ! I sent two of my servants with seven natives a 

 voyage of one hundred miles to the most celebrated place for birds 

 (Amberbaki, mentioned by Lesson), and after twenty days they brought 

 me back nothing but two specimens of P. papuana and one of P. regia : 

 XVII. o 



