422 



THE KS ISLANDS. |chap. kxzx. 



one of the fifty inhabitants of our prau seemed to be 

 buying on bis own account, till all available and most 

 unavailable space of our vessel was occupied with these 

 miscellaneous articles: for every man on board a prau 

 considers himself at liberty to trade, and to cany with 

 him whatever he can afford to buy. 



Money is unknown and valueless here — knivea, cloth, 

 and arrack forming the only medium of exchange, with 

 tobacco for small coin. Every transaction is the subject of 

 a special bai-gain, and the cause of much talking. It ia 

 absolutely necessary to offer very little, as the natives are 

 never satisfied tdl you add a little more. Tliey are then 

 far better pleased than if you had given them twice the 

 amount at first and refused to increase it. 



I, too, was doing a little business, having persuaded 

 some of the native.^ to collect insects for me ; and when 

 they really found that I gave them most fragrant tobacco 

 for worthless black and green beetles^ I soon had scores of 

 visitors, men, women, and children, bringing bamboos full 

 of creeping things^ which, alas ! too frequently had eaten 

 each other into fragments during the tedium of a day's 

 confinement Of one gmnd new beetle, glittering with 

 ruby and emerald tints, I got a large quantity, having first 

 detected one of its wing-eases ornamenting the outside of 

 a native's tobacco pouch. It was quite a new species, and 

 had not been fotmd elsewhere than on this little island. 

 It is one of the Buprestidoe, and has been named Cypho- 

 gastm calepygaL 



Each morning after an early breakfast I wandered by 

 myself into the forest, where T foimd delightful occupation 

 in capturing the large and handsome butterflies, which 

 were tolerably abundant, and most of them new to me ; 

 for I was now upon the confines of the Moluccas and New 

 Guinea,~a region the productions of which were then 

 among the most precious and rare in the cabinets of 

 Europe, Here my eyes were feasted for the first time with 

 splendid scarlet lories on the wing, as well as by the sight 

 of that most imperial butterfly, the "Prianuis" of col- 

 lectors, or a closely allied species, but fl}dng so high that I 

 did not succeed in capturing a specimen. One of them 

 was brought me in a bamboo, boxed up with a lot of 



