I found too on inquiry that the people here made no clearings, living entirely on sago, fruit, fish, and game; and the path only led to a steep rocky mountain equally impracticable and unproductive.

The next day I sent my men to this hill, hoping it might produce some good birds; but they returned with only two common species, and I myself had been able to get nothing; every little track I had attempted to follow leading to a dense sago swamp.

I saw that I should waste time by staying here, and determined to leave the following day.
This is one of those spots so hard for the European naturalist to conceive, where with all the riches of a tropical vegetation, and partly perhaps from the very luxuriance of that vegetation, insects are as scarce as in the most barren parts of Europe, and hardly more conspicuous.

In temperate climates there is a tolerable uniformity in the distribution of insects over those parts of a country in which there is a similarity in the vegetation, any deficiency being easily accounted for by the absence of wood or uniformity of surface.

The traveller hastily passing through such a country can at once pick out a collecting ground which will afford him a fair notion of its entomology.