My life : a record of events and opinions - Wallace-online.org

204 MY LIFEbeetles,and land-shells, and they amounted roughlyto about three thousand bird skins of about athousand species, and, perhaps, twenty thousandbeetles and butterflies of about seven thousandspecies.For the next month I was fully occupied in theunpacking and arranging of my collections, whMe Iusually attended the evening meetings of the Zoological,Entomological, and Linnean Societies, whereI met many old friends and made several new ones,and greatly enjoyed the society of people interestedin the subjects that now had almost become thebusiness of my life.As soon as I began to study my birds I had topay frequent visits to the bird-room of the BritishMuseum, then in charge of Mr. George Robert Gray,who had described many of my discoveries as I. sentthem home, and also to the library of the ZoologicalSociety to consult the works of the older ornithologists.In this way the time passed rapidly, and Ibecame so interested in my various occupations, andsaw so many opportunities for useful and instructivepapers on various groups of my birds and insects, thatI came to the conclusion to devote myself for someyears to this work, and to put off the writing of abook on my travels till I could embody in it all themore generally interesting results derived from thedetailed study of certain portions of my collections.This delay turned out very well, as I was therebyenabled to make my book not merely the journalof a traveller, but also a fairly complete sketch ofthe whole of the great Malayan Archipelago fromthe point of view of the philosophic naturalist. Theresult has been that it long continued to be themost popular of my books, and that even now, forty