The Number Of Openings,
Sunny Places, And Pathways Were Also An Attraction To Wasps And
Butterflies; And By Paying A Cent Each For All Insects That Were
Brought Me, I Obtained From The Dyaks And The Chinamen Many Fine
Locusts And Phasmidae, As Well As Numbers Of Handsome Beetles.
When I arrived at the mines, on the 14th of March, I had
collected in the four preceding months, 320 different kinds of
beetles.
In less than a fortnight I had doubled this number, an
average of about 24 new species every day. On one day I collected
76 different kinds, of which 34 were new to me. By the end of
April I had more than a thousand species, and they then went on
increasing at a slower rate, so that I obtained altogether in
Borneo about two thousand distinct kinds, of which all but about
a hundred were collected at this place, and on scarcely more than
a square mile of ground. The most numerous and most interesting
groups of beetles were the Longicorns and Rhynchophora, both pre-
eminently wood-feeders. The former, characterised by their
graceful forms and long antenna, were especially numerous,
amounting to nearly three hundred species, nine-tenths of which
were entirely new, and many of them remarkable for their large
size, strange forms, and beautiful colouring. The latter
correspond to our weevils and allied groups, and in the tropics
are exceedingly numerous and varied, often swarming upon dead
timber, so that I sometimes obtained fifty or sixty different
kinds in a day.
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