298 CORAL AND ATOLLS 



lead a very clean life upon the dry coral islands :— but pigs 

 are not to be introduced lightly into Mohammedan commu- 

 nities; and though the Chinaman loves the animal in its every 

 phase, and tends with fond care the few that are now kept in 

 the islands, the pig is not destined to extend its domain beyond 

 the limits of its sty. Cats have been introduced, and, cat-like, 

 have become feral, and a nuisance. A somewhat strange in- 

 cident may be related about cats. On the island on which 

 I lived, no cat had ever been introduced ; the settlement 

 was some five years old, and no cat had ever belonged to 

 any of the settlers, so far as is known. A female kitten was 

 brought to the island as a pet, and as she grew up, suspicions 

 concerning her seemed obviously justified, though apparently 

 absurd. The birth of a healthy batch of kittens put all 

 doubts to rest. Their prevailing colour was black, and a 

 great black tom cat ultimately fell to a gun at dead of night, 

 but if he had not called to see his family, he might still 

 be living on that island unknown and happy. This was a 

 lesson to me, for the island was less than a mile lonsf, and 

 about two hundred yards wide at its broadest part ; I had been 

 hunting for the fauna of that tiny strip of land for over a 

 year — and twenty-eight men lived on the island — and yet 

 not I, nor any other person, had the least idea that a decent- 

 sized mammal existed on the little stretch of coral land. A 

 monkey and a lemur, which were lost on the island during my 

 stay, also managed to disappear utterly. No one ever saw the 

 . lemur again, and, being nocturnal, that is not so strange ; but 

 though every man's hand was against the monkey, for he stole 

 our chickens, he was only sighted once in the course of very 

 many months. These facts show how very easy it is to live in 

 the tiniest of restricted areas, and yet, with every interest in 

 your surroundings, to fail to see even fair-sized animals that 

 live around you. While these things are so, we have no 

 necessity to create new species on the strength of their having 

 white whiskers instead of the usual grey. 



In some extraordinary fashion, a monkey once effected his 

 own passage to th§ islands ; the manner of his coming is a 



