The Aspect Of The Village Itself Is Very Neat, The Ground Being Often Swept Before The Chief Houses; But Very

Bad odours abound, owing to there being under every house a stinking mud-hole, formed by all waste liquids and

Refuse matter, poured down through the floor above. In most other things Malays are tolerably clean - in some scrupulously so; and this peculiar and nasty custom, which is almost universal, arises, I have little doubt, from their having been originally a maritime and water-loving people, who built their houses on posts in the water, and only migrated gradually inland, first up the rivers and streams, and then into the dry interior. Habits which were at once so convenient and so cleanly, and which had been so long practised as to become a portion of the domestic life of the nation, were of course continued when the first settlers built their houses inland; and without a regular system of drainage, the arrangement of the villages is such that any other system would be very inconvenient.

In all these Sumatran villages I found considerable difficulty in getting anything to eat. It was not the season for vegetables, and when, after much trouble, I managed to procure some yams of a curious variety, I found them hard and scarcely eatable. Fowls were very scarce; and fruit was reduced to one of the poorest kinds of banana. The natives (during the wet season at least) live exclusively on rice, as the poorer Irish do on potatoes. A pot of rice cooked very dry and eaten with salt and red peppers, twice a day, forms their entire food during a large part of the year. This is no sign of poverty, but is simply custom; for their wives and children are loaded with silver armlets from wrist to elbow, and carry dozens of silver coins strung round their necks or suspended from their ears.

As I had moved away from Palembang, I had found the Malay spoken by the common people less and less pure, until at length it became quite unintelligible, although the continual recurrence of many well-known words assured me it was a form of Malay, and enabled me to guess at the main subject of conversation. This district had a very bad reputation a few years ago, and travellers were frequently robbed and murdered. Fights between village and village were also of frequent occurrence, and many lives were lost, owing to disputes about boundaries or intrigues with women. Now, however, since the country has been divided into districts under "Controlleurs," who visit every village in turn to hear complaints and settle disputes, such things are heard of no more. This is one of the numerous examples I have met with of the good effects of the Dutch Government. It exercises a strict surveillance over its most distant possessions, establishes a form of government well adapted to the character of the people, reforms abuses, punishes crimes, and makes itself everywhere respected by the native population.

Lobo Raman is a central point of the east end of Sumatra, being about a hundred and twenty miles from the sea to the east, north, and west. The surface is undulating, with no mountains or even hills, and there is no rock, the soil being generally a red pliable clay. Numbers of small streams and rivers intersect the country, and it is pretty equally divided between open clearings and patches of forest, both virgin and second growth, with abundance of fruit trees; and there is no lack of paths to get about in any direction. Altogether it is the very country that would promise most for a naturalist, and I feel sure that at a more favourable time of year it would prove exceedingly rich; but it was now the rainy season, when, in the very best of localities, insects are always scarce, and there being no fruit on the trees, there was also a scarcity of birds. During a month's collecting, I added only three or four new species to my list of birds, although I obtained very fine specimens of many which were rare and interesting. In butterflies I was rather more successful, obtaining several fine species quite new to me, and a considerable number of very rare and beautiful insects. I will give here some account of two species of butterflies, which, though very common in collections, present us with peculiarities of the highest interest.

The first is the handsome Papilio memnon, a splendid butterfly of a deep black colour, dotted over with lines and groups of scales of a clear ashy blue. Its wings are five inches in expanse, and the hind wings are rounded, with scalloped edges. This applies to the males; but the females are very different, and vary so much that they were once supposed to form several distinct species. They may be divided into two groups - those which resemble the male in shape, and, those which differ entirely from him in the outline of the wings. The first vary much in colour, being often nearly white with dusky yellow and red markings, but such differences often occur in butterflies. The second group are much more extraordinary, and would never be supposed to be the same insect, since the hind wings are lengthened out into large spoon- shaped tails, no rudiment of which is ever to be perceived in the males or in the ordinary form of females. These tailed females are never of the dark and blue-glossed tints which prevail in the male and often occur in the females of the same form, but are invariably ornamented with stripes and patches of white or buff, occupying the larger part of the surface of the hind wings. This peculiarity of colouring led me to discover that this extraordinary female closely resembles (when flying) another butterfly of the same genus but of a different group (Papilio coön), and that we have here a case of mimicry similar to those so well illustrated and explained by Mr. Bates.[ Trans.

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