RHIZOMYS SUMATRENSIS. 213 



NOTE XXVII. 

 ON RHIZOMYS SUMATRENSIS 



Dr. P. A. JENTINK. 



December 1896. 



It perhaps will for ever remain an insolvable puzzle 

 why Sir Raffles described under the name Mus sumatrensis 

 a Mouse (after a drawing and a specimen) not from Sumatra, 

 as the name should give reason to believe, but from Malacca, 

 an animal after Major Farquhar not uncommon there and 

 perhaps to be found in most parts of the Malay peninsula. 

 Sir Raffles' paper has been read December 5, 1820, com- 

 municated by Sir Everard Home in the meeting of the 

 Linnean Society of London , and it does not appear that one 

 of the members has been struck by the remarkable per- 

 plexing contradiction ! Mr. Temminck thinking it nonsense 

 to bestow upon an animal from the Indian continent the 

 name of an island where the animal is unknown, called it 

 dekan instead of sumatrensis. The latter name however — 

 being nonsense or not — is the first given and ought to be 

 generally accepted. Temminck was quite right in separating 

 the species from the genus Mus: he gave it the generic 

 title Nyctodeptes , so that the correct writing of the Ma- 

 lacca-animal would have been Nyctocleptes sumatrensis 

 (Raffles), if not Mr. Gray a couple of years previously had 

 created the genus Rhizomys for the reception of a new 

 species from China and that of Raffles'. The name for the 

 latter stands therefore as Rhizomys sumatrensis (Raffles). 



In the course of later years there have been found on 



JN^otes frora the Leyden IMuseum, Vol. XVIII. 



