ttle rice occasionally, and
abundance of vegetables and fruit.

It is a curious fact that everywhere in the Past where the Portuguese
have mixed with the native races they leave become darker in colour than
either of the parent stocks. This is the case almost always with these
"Orang Sirani" in the Moluccas, and with the Portuguese of Malacca.
The reverse is the case in South America, where the mixture of the
Portuguese or Brazilian with the Indian produces the "Mameluco," who is
not unfrequently lighter than either parent, and always lighter than the
Indian. The women at Batchian, although generally fairer than the men,
are coarse in features, and very far inferior in beauty to the mixed
Dutch-Malay girls, or even to many pure Malays.

The part of the village in which I resided was a grove of cocoa-nut
trees, and at night, when the dead leaves were sometimes collected
together and burnt, the effect was most magnificent--the tall stems,
the fine crowns of foliage, and the immense fruit-clusters, being
brilliantly illuminated against a dark sky, and appearing like a fairy
palace supported on a hundred columns, and groined over with leafy
arches. The cocoa-nut tree, when well grown, is certainly the prince of
palms both for beauty and utility.

During my very first walk into the forest at Batchian, I had seen
sitting on a leaf out of reach, an immense butterfly of a dark colour
marked with white and yellow spots. I could not capture it as it flew
away high up into the forest, but I at once saw that it was a female of
a new species of Ornithoptera or "bird-winged butterfly," the pride of
the Eastern tropics. I was very anxious to get it and to find the
male, which in this genus is always of extreme beauty. During the two
succeeding months I only saw it once again, and shortly afterwards I saw
the male flying high in the air at the mining village. I had begun to
despair of ever getting a specimen, as it seemed so rare and wild; till
one day, about the beginning of January, I found a beautiful shrub with
large white leafy bracts and yellow flowers, a species of Mussaenda, and
saw one of these noble insects hovering over it, but it was too quick
for me, and flew away. The next clay I went again to the same shrub and
succeeded in catching a female, and the day after a fine male. I
found it to be as I had expected, a perfectly new and most magnificent
species, and one of the most gorgeously coloured butterflies in the
world.