page_title: The Malay Archipelago
section_title: Indo-Malay Islands
hierarchical_section_title: The Malay Archipelago / Contents / Volume 1 / Indo-Malay Islands
caption_attribution_description: English: Top left: Neocerambyx aeneus = Aeolesthes aurifaber (White, 1853) Top right: Megacriodes Saundersii = Batocera saundersii (Pascoe, 1866) Center: Diurus furcellatus [sic] = Diurus furcillatus Gyllenhal, 1833 Bottom left: Cladognathus tarandus = Cyclommatus tarandus (Thunberg, 1806) Bottom center: Ectatorhinus Wallacei = Ectatorhinus wallacei Lacordaire, 1866 Bottom right: Cyriopalpus [sic] Wallacei = Cyriopalus wallacei Pascoe, 1866 "Remarkable beetles found at Simunjon [River], Borneo When I arrived at the mines, on the 14th of March [1855], 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. My Bornean collections of this group exceeded five hundred species." (A.R. Wallace)
context_page_description: The Malay Archipelago is a book by the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace which chronicles his scientific exploration, during the eight-year period 1854 to 1862, of the southern portion of the Malay Archipelago including Malaysia, Singapore, the islands of Indonesia, then known as the Dutch East Indies, and the island of New Guinea. It was published in two volumes in 1869, delayed by Wallace's ill health and the work needed to describe the many specimens he brought home. The book went through ten editions in the nineteenth century; it has been reprinted many times since, and has been translated into at least eight languages.
  The book describes each island that he visited in turn, giving a detailed account of its physical and human geography, its volcanoes, and the variety of animals and plants that he found and collected. At the same time, he describes his experiences, the difficulties of travel, and the help he received from the different peoples that he met. The preface notes that he travelled over 14,000 miles and collected 125,660 natural history specimens, mostly of insects though also thousands of molluscs, birds, mammals and reptiles.
context_section_description: 2 Singapore
  Wallace gives a lively description of the people of the town, and of the wildlife of the island. He finds the Chinese the most noticeable of the people, while in one square mile of forest he found 700 species of beetles including 130 longhorns.
  3 Malacca and Mount Ophir.
  He finds an attractive old Portuguese town, and beautiful birds such as the blue-billed gaper. The flora includes pitcher plants and giant ferns. There are tigers and rhinoceros, but the elephants had already disappeared.
  4 Borneo—The Orang-Utan
  He stays in Sarawak, and finds the Simunjon coal-works convenient, as the workers are happy to be paid a little for insects they find, including locusts, stick insects and about 24 new species of beetles each day. In all he collects 2000 species of beetle in Borneo, nearly all at the coal mine site; he also found a flying frog and orang-utans in the same place.
  5 Borneo—Journey in the Interior
  Wallace returns to Sarawak, where he stays in the circular 'head-house' of a Dyak village, travels upriver, and describes the Durian, praising it as the king of fruits with exquisite and unsurpassed flavour, and the Dyak's slender bamboo bridges, as well as ferns and Nepenthes pitcher plants. On a mountain he finds the only place in his entire journey where moths are abundant; he collected 1,386 moths on a total of 26 nights, but over 800 of these were caught on four very wet and dark nights. He attributes the reason to having a ceiling that effectively trapped the moths; in other houses the moths at once escaped into the roof, and he recommends naturalists to bring a verandah-shaped tent to enable them to catch moths.
  6 Borneo—The Dyaks
  Wallace describes the Dyak people, expressing surprise that despite Thomas Malthus's predictions for the human population of the world, and the lack of any obvious restraints, the Dyak population appeared to be stable.
  7 Java
  Wallace stayed three and a half months in Java, where he admires the system of government and the contented people. The population is, he notes, rapidly increasing, from 3.5 million in 1800 to 5.5 million in 1826 and 14 million in 1865. He enjoys the fine Hindu archaeological sites, and the flora of the mountain tops which have plants resembling those of Europe, including the royal cowslip, Primula imperialis, endemic to one mountain top.
  8 Sumatra
  He visits Sumatra while the coastal forest of Nipa palms is flooded to a distance of several miles from the sea. The river houses at Palembang are built on rafts moored to piles, rising and falling with the tide. He admires the traditional houses of the villages, but had difficulty getting any food there, the people living entirely on rice through the rainy season. He discovers some new species of butterfly including Papilio memnon which occurs in different forms, some being Batesian mimics of Papilio coon. He admires the camouflage of a species of dead leaf butterfly, Kallima paralekta. He is pleased that one of his hunters brings him a male hornbill, shot at its nest hole while feeding the female.
  9 Natural History Of The Indo-Malay Islands.
  Wallace sketches the natural history of the islands to the West of the Wallace line, noting that the flora is like that of India, as described by the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker in his 1855 Flora Indica. Similarly the mammals are similar to those of India, including the tiger, leopard, rhinoceros and elephant. The bird species had diverged, but the genera were mainly the same, and some species of (for example) woodpecker, parrot, kingfisher and pheasant were found from India to Java and Borneo, while many more were found both in Sumatra and the Malay peninsula.
caption: "Remarkable Beetles Found at Simunjon, Borneo: Neocerambyx æneas, Cladognathus tarandus, Diurus furcellatus, Ectatorhinus Wallacei, Megacriodes Saundersii, Cyriopalpus Wallacei"
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