126 IN MALAY FORESTS. 



animal, have little or no chance of seeing a tapir 

 except by some rare accident. 



But though the tapir carries no trophies, it is not 

 without a fascination of its own. When one has a 

 little imagination, what can be more interesting than 

 to follow through vast gloomy forests the tracks of an 

 animal that is one of the oldest mammalian forms, 

 an animal that once existed in England, where fossil 

 bones, practically undistinguishable from those of the 

 living species of to-day, are found in the Miocene 

 deposits of Suffolk ; and an animal of a date so much 

 earlier than that of the hippopotami, elephants, and 

 rhinoceroses that once roamed through the valley of 

 the Thames, that in the days of the Pleistocene period, 

 when they played and fought on the river -banks, it 

 had already become in England as extinct as they are 

 to-day. 



When one follows its tracks one can see imprinted 

 upon the ground the history of its incalculable 

 antiquity, for the front foot has four toes, and the 

 hind-foot has only three. That is to say, the tapir, in 

 its efforts to leave the primitive five -toed type, has 

 only succeeded in discarding one toe of the fore-foot 

 and two toes of the hind -foot. It is, therefore, a 

 stage behind the rhinoceros, which has three toes to 

 each foot ; and both are far behind the horse, which 

 has arrived at the irreducible minimum of a single 

 toe. Long before the days of the hipparion, the three- 

 toed ancestor of the horse, the tapir existed in its 

 present form ; and while the three-toed horse evolved 

 through countless generations, species after species 

 passing away to be replaced by a form more nearly 



