Zoological Names and Theories of the Malays. 451 



of our Malay servants bought a portion of a tulang maiwas 

 for several dollars in Kelantan : it was an iron implement 

 not unlike an ordinary mason's cliisel in shape. The Eaja 

 Mudah Jering told us that within his own memory a skull 

 of the Maiwas had been dug up in his state. 



But neither the legend of the Maiwas nor that of the 

 " Bird of Heaven " is typical of Malay zoology, for both deal 

 with animals which few Malays have seen alive or in the 

 flesh. Far more interesting, from a true zoological stand- 

 point, is the story of the Ular Bibu-Elbu, a worm of the 

 genus Gordius, which is found, at one stage of its existence, 

 in small streams and puddles of water at the roots of trees. 

 It owes its name to the extraordinary resemblance that it 

 bears to a piece of the fine creeping rhizome of the fern 

 Lygodium, called Pdkoh-Pdku Rlhu-Mhu — the " Fern with 

 Thousands " of coils or fronds, which twines on tree-trunks and 

 similar supports. The worm is said to turn into this fern : it 

 is also said to be the " child " of a large green Mantis named 

 Ulat Sidi-Tiddr,ihe'' Sleeping Saint "Grub,^ and an earthworm 

 which leaps out of his burrow at night to welcome her. The 

 story would be meaningless did we not know that Gordiid 

 Nematodes frequently are parasitic in the abdomens of 

 Mantises, whence they issue upon reaching maturity. At 

 Cambridge there is a specimen from Borneo of Gordius 

 ornatus actually issuing from the Mantis Rhorabodera basalis; 

 at South Kensington a similar specimen, both host and 

 parasite belonging to different species (Gordius verrucosus 

 and Hierodula hioculata), from West Africa; and in the 

 Hope Department at Oxford there is a third, in which the 

 worm was seen to come out. Under these circumstances, 

 what appears at first sight to be a mere collection of impos- 

 sibilities becomes a piece of close observation vitiated by 

 wild imagination. 



We have already seen two instances in which an animal 

 was supposed to turn into a plant which it resembled. 

 Examples of the contrary transformation are even commoner. 



^ This is one translation of the name ; another, given me by a Perak Malay, 

 is " Lazy Sleeping Grub." 



