Sometimes the dry season was the hindrance; more frequently residence
in a town or village not close to virgin forest, and surrounded by other
houses whose lights were a counter-attraction; still more frequently
residence in a dark palm-thatched house, with a lofty roof, in whose
recesses every moth was lost the instant it entered. This last was the
greatest drawback, and the real reason why I never again was able to
make a collection of moths; for I never afterwards lived in a solitary
jungle-house with a low boarded and whitewashed verandah, so constructed
as to prevent insects at once escaping into the upper part of the house,
quite out of reach.
After my long experience, my numerous failures, and my one success, I
feel sure that if any party of naturalists ever make a yacht-voyage to
explore the Malayan Archipelago, or any other tropical region, making
entomology one of their chief pursuits, it would well repay them to
carry a small framed verandah, or a verandah-shaped tent of white
canvas, to set up in every favourable situation, as a means of making
a collection of nocturnal Lepidoptera, and also of obtaining rare
specimens of Coleoptera and other insects. I make the suggestion here,
because no one would suspect the enormous difference in results that
such an apparatus would produce; and because I consider it one of the
curiosities of a collector's experience, to have found out that some
such apparatus is required.
When I returned to Singapore I took with me the Malay lad named Ali,
who subsequently accompanied me all over the Archipelago. Charles
Allen preferred staying at the Mission-house, and afterwards obtained
employment in Sarawak and in Singapore, until he again joined me four
years later at Amboyna in the Moluccas.
CHAPTER VI. BORNEO--THE DYAKS.
THE manners and customs of the aborigines of Borneo have been described
in great detail, and with much fuller information than I possess, in the
writings of Sir James Brooke, Messrs. Low, St. John, Johnson Brooke,
and many others. I do not propose to go over the ground again, but shall
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