XXII] CELEBES, THE MOLUCCAS, ETC. 369 



are less fitted to get rich, if they did try, than myself.'* 

 The rest of the letter is devoted to new discoveries in 

 photography and allied subjects. 



I left Ternate by the Dutch mail steamer on May i, 

 1859, calling at Amboyna and spending two days at Banda, 

 where I visited the celebrated nutmeg plantations, reaching 

 Coupang, at the west end of Timor, on the 13th. The country 

 round proving almost a desert for a collector, I went to the 

 small island of Semau, where I obtained a few birds, but 

 little else. I therefore returned to Coupang after a week 

 and determined to go back the way I came by Amboyna 

 and Ternate to Menado, in order to lose no time, and arrived 

 there on June 10. Here I remained for four months in one 

 of the most interesting districts in the whole archipelago. I 

 visited several localities in the interior, and obtained a 

 number of the rare and peculiar species of birds and a con- 

 siderable collection of beetles and butterflies, mostly rare or 

 new, but by no means so numerous as I had obtained in 

 other good localities. 



In October I returned to Amboyna in order to visit the 

 almost unknown island of Ceram, which, however, I found 

 very unproductive and unhealthy. While there I wrote a 

 short letter to Bates, congratulating him on his safe return 

 to England, discussing great schemes for the writing and 

 publication of works on our respective collections, adding, 

 " I have sent a paper lately to the Linnean Society which 

 gives my views of the principles of geographical distribu- 

 tion in the archipelago, of which I hope some day to work 

 out the details." ^ 



In December, being almost starved, I returned to Amboyna 

 to recruit, and in February started on another journey to 

 Ceram, with the intention, if possible, of again reaching the 

 Ke Islands, which I had found so rich during the few days I 

 stayed there on my voyage to the Aru Islands. I visited 

 several places on the coast of Ceram, and spent three days 

 very near its centre, where a very rough mountain path 



1 The title of this paper was "On the Zoological Geography of Malay 

 Archipelago," and it was published in i860. 



VOL. I. . 2 B 



