THE CLOUDED TIGER 5 1 



Hall, Piccadilly. From its name of "tortoiseshell 

 tiger," the shortness and stoutness of its legs, and the 

 length of its tail, Dr. Horsfield accepted it as an un- 

 doubted F. nebulosa. Unfortunately he neither seems 

 to have seen the animal nor was he able on enquiry to 

 learn what had become of it: he could find no 

 record of it in the sale catalogue of the Bullock 

 Museum in 1820. It is probable, however, that this 

 skin was the same as that mentioned by the Rev. 

 J. G. Wood in his "Illustrated Natural History": 

 he states that the first clouded tiger or "rimau 

 dahan" seen in England was kept in a travelling 

 menagerie, and that after its death, the skin was 

 ignorantly cut up into caps for the keepers. One 

 wonders that Bullock did not permanently add 

 it to his Museum. 



Be this as it may, to Sir Stamford Raffles is 

 generally assigned the credit of discovering the 

 clouded tiofer. He obtained it from the forests of 

 Bencoolen in Sumatra, and published the first 

 distinct notice of it under the name of Rimau Dahan 

 in the thirteenth volume of the Transactions of the 

 Linnean Society. "The Rimau Dahan is about the 

 size of a leopard but is of a darker colour". On 

 leaving Bencoolen for England by the ship "Fame" 

 on February 2nd, 1824, he shipped a large natural 

 history collection, together with a living "rimau 

 dahan." This was a kitten already ten months 

 in Raffles' possession. The youngster was perfectly 



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