MISCELLANEOUS NOTES. 



No. I.— NOTES ON THE HABITS AND COLOURATION OF 

 THE WHITE-HANDED GIBBON {HTLOBATES LAR, L.). 



Blanford notes that H. lar is said to drink by scooping up water with its 

 hand, but all the specimens I have seen in confinement drank in the ordinary 

 way by putting their lips to the water. 



The brown form was the most numerous in this District, only about one 

 in ten being black, while none of the very pale or bright yellow varieties 

 were observed. In lar, black individuals may be either males or females, 

 but as Blanford notes, in ' hoolock ' black males and brown females 

 appear to predominate. In Western Australia male red kangaroos 

 {Macropus ricfus) are normally red and the females greyish-blue, the 

 females however are very frequently red, and the males may occasionally 

 be blue. Towards the North- West the 'blue doe ' entirely disappears, both 

 sexes becoming similar in colour. It is just possible that the variable colour- 

 ation of the gibbons may be analogous in a still more irregular degree. 



But I think there is little doubt that the black individuals that occur both 

 in this species and ' hoolock ' are melanistic, and that brown is the normal 

 colour in both sexes. The white eyebrows in 'hoolock' and the white 

 circle, hands and feet in lar being, like the tail tip of an Australian 

 opossum, characters that are not affected by melanism. 



It may be noted that the black varieties of both the grey and ring tail 

 opossums are most plentiful in the thick coastal belt of South- Western 

 Australia, while even the common grey kangaroos are distinctly darker 

 within that tract. In India the panther is without doubt most frequently 

 melanistic in the forest, especially the evergreen forest regions, black panthers 

 being in the Peninsula extremely rare away from the thick jungles that clothe 

 the Western Ghats — much of which is evergreen, they become more numer- 

 ous however to the East of Bengal and still more so in the evergreen tracts of 

 Tenasserim and the Malay countries. The forest dwelling gibbons are 

 possibly affected in the same way as the panther, while the black forms of 

 Ratufa occurring to the East of Bengal, Ceylon and the extreme South 

 of India may have originated in a similar manner though in this case the 

 changes have become specific. What influence evergreen forests can have 

 in encouraging melanism it is difficult to say, but it may have something to do 

 with the much greater darkness or the constantly nioist atmosphere and 

 greater rainfall. At all events I believe that for some unknown reason 

 there is a distinct tendency for many Indian mammals to become melanistic 

 in evergreen forest areas, especially as the Malay countries are approached 

 where the forests are entirely evergreen. 



G. C. SHORTRIDGE. 

 Rangoon, 1914. 



No. II.— THE WHITE-BELLIED FLYING SQUIRREL 

 IN GARHWAL. 



I see in report No. 15 of the Mammal Survey a note on Petaurista albi- 

 venter in which it is stated that this species is exceedingly local. 



If I am not mistaken in the species — and I think I am not — I think the 

 above is hardly correct. Presumably Garhwal is not included in the 

 writer's interpretation of Kumaon, but it adjoins it and if P. albiventer is 

 common here it must be common there. 



