[The Malay Archipelago by Alfred Russell Wallace]@TWC D-Link book
The Malay Archipelago

CHAPTER XXIX
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They 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 natives 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 grand new beetle, glittering with ruby and emerald tints, I got a large quantity, having first detected one of its wing-cases ornamenting the outside of a native's tobacco pouch.

It was quite a new species, and had not been found elsewhere than on this little island.

It is one of the Buprestidae, and has been named Cyphogastra calepyga.
Each morning after an early breakfast I wandered by myself into the forest, where I found 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 "Priamus" of collectors, or a closely allied species, but flying so high that I did not succeed in capturing a specimen.


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