the Rajah, who possessed in a pre-eminent degree the art of making every
one around him comfortable and happy.
A few days afterwards I returned to the mountain with Charles and a
Malay boy named Ali and stayed there three weeks for the purpose of
making a collection of land-shells, butterflies and moths, ferns and
orchids. On the hill itself ferns were tolerably plentiful, and I made
a collection of about forty species. But what occupied me most was
the great abundance of moths which on certain occasions I was able to
capture. As during the whole of my eight years' wanderings in the East
I never found another spot where these insects were at all plentiful,
it will be interesting to state the exact conditions under which I here
obtained them.
On one side of the cottage there was a verandah, looking down the whole
side of the mountain and to its summit on the right, all densely clothed
with forest. The boarded sides of the cottage were whitewashed, and the
roof of the verandah was low, and also boarded and whitewashed. As soon
as it got dark I placed my lamp on a table against the wall, and with
pins, insect-forceps, net, and collecting-boxes by my side, sat down
with a book. Sometimes during the whole evening only one solitary moth
would visit me, while on other nights they would pour in, in a continual
stream, keeping me hard at work catching and pinning till past midnight.
They came literally by the thousands. These good nights were very few.
During the four weeks that I spent altogether on the hill I only had
four really good nights, and these were always rainy, and the best
of them soaking wet. But wet nights were not always good, for a rainy
moonlight night produced next to nothing. All the chief tribes of moths
were represented, and the beauty and variety of the species was very
great. On good nights I was able to capture from a hundred to two
hundred and fifty moths, and these comprised on each occasion from half
to two-thirds that number of distinct species. Some of them would settle
on the wall, some on the table, while many would fly up to the roof and
give me a chase all over the verandah before I could secure them. In
order to show the curious connection between the state of weather and
the degree in which moths were attracted to light, I add a list of my
captures each night of my stay on the hill:
Date (1855) No. of Moths Remarks
76