166 AUSTEALASIA. 



about a hundred mammals five or six, and of two hundred and seventy kinds of 

 birds, forty are peculiar to this island. But, strange to say, certain animals 

 characteristic of the other large Indonesian islands are not met in Java ; here are 

 neither the elephant, the tapir, nor the orang-utan, but instead the elegant dwarf- 

 deer, a perfect miniature of the common European deer. Of the large mammals, 

 the most remarkable are the rhinoceros and wild ox, but the former have become 

 very rare and are already restricted to the western provinces. The tiger still 

 infests the jungle in various parts of the island, and hundreds of human beings 

 yearly fall victims to its ravages. As in India, when their teeth are worn they 

 often become man-eaters, and in the province of Bantam whole villages have had 

 to be displaced in consequence of their depredations. The crocodiles are also very 

 dangerous in certain rivers, although causing fewer deaths than the tigers. The 

 tokei, a lizard of gigantic size, is so named from its cry, which a stranger might 

 fancy uttered by a human being. 



The insular dependencies of Java present some peculiarities in their faunas. 

 Bawean especially almost constitutes a little zoological world apart, and even 

 Nusa Kembangan, which is scarcely more than a peninsula of the mainland, has a 

 woodlark {pieropus aterrinms) not found in Java. 



Inhabitants. 



The natives of Java do not all belong to a common national group. The 

 Malays, properly so-called, are represented only by immigrants, and are in the 

 ascendant only in a section of the province of Batavia, whither they have been 

 attracted by trade and political influences. The rest of the island is occupied by 

 the Sundanese, the far more numerous Javanese, and the Madurese, three groups 

 distinguished chiefly by their languages, 



Excluding the Malay enclave of Batavia and the north coast, where the 

 Javanese language has prevailed, the western part of Java is inhabited by the 

 Sundanese as far as a transverse line drawn from Cheribon Bay to the mouth of the 

 Tanduwi. The term Sunda given to this region is of very ancient date, and the 

 Sundanese, or " Men of the Soil," that is, aborigines, thanks to the hilly nature of 

 their territory, hav^e better preserved their primitive usages than the other 

 inhabitants of the island. They are as a rule taller, more robust, and healthier ; 

 but they are regarded as relatively barbarous, and in the company of Malays or 

 Javanese, they are themselves ashamed of their dialect, which is looked on as a 

 sort of rude patois. Less developed than the Javanese, it differs little from it in the 

 primitive stock of words and structure, but it contains far fewer Sanskrit terms, 

 Hindu influences having been relatively weak in the Sundanese highlands. Yet 

 the people at one time accepted Buddhism, and afterwards Islam. They have also 

 suffered much from invasions, and the word preang, which gives its name to the 

 Preanger Begencies, is said to have the meaning of " Land of Extermination." 



In the upper Ujung Valley, near the western extremity of the island, about a 

 thousand Sundanese, known by the name of Badui, still practise pagan rites inter- 



