
1042 The American Naturalist. | December, 
of the elephant in those of other eastern peoples. Some had 
described it to us as a great beast with one sharp horn in the 
middle of its forehead; and all stories agree as to its great speed 
and fierceness in attacking men and other animals at sight. 
We knew that the island had been but little studied in a sci- 
entific way ; but our curiosity and our anxiety to visit it was 
much increased by the Spanish governor of Mindoro, who is also 
governor of Marinduque, and who visited the latter island dur- 
ing our stay. I asked him what scientific study of the island had 
been made, and he answered: “ Wi dien ni mal” (neither well nor 
ill—not at all). He said a Spanish scientific commission had 
landed there once since he had been governor, ‘but had gone 
away without visiting the interior, for fear of the malaria. It was 
then with a great deal of interest that we looked across the strait 
to the west to the lofty mountains of the island, which were con- 
tinually in our sight, and planned our trip to this unknown land. 
The visit of the governor was a fortunate one for us, for we found 
that one of the passenger steamers from the south would call on 
its way to Manila and take him directly across the strait; other- 
wise we should have been compelled to hire a native boat, or to 
have gone to Manila and returned from there to Mindoro. The 
time of the steamer was not closely fixed, so that for two or three 
days we were half packed up, and dared not go far away in 
hunting. But finally, one afternoon, the lookout gave notice that 
the steamer was in sight ; and half an hour afterwards the goods of 
the governor were being hurried down to the beach on buffalo 
carts, and our own soon followed in the same manner, and were 
piled on the sand just above the tide, where they were taken by 
the ship’s boats and carried out to the steamer, which lay at 
anchor half a mile away. Just at night we got on board our- 
selves, while the anchor was being hauled up, and after a quiet 
voyage across were landed, near midnight, at the port and town of 
Calapan, again by the ship’s boats, and at a long bridge or wharf 
of wood supported by piles and running two or three hundred feet 
out into the bay. A part of this was roofed over, and some of us 
swung our hammocks here, while the others camped with their 
guns among the baggage, which was piled on the beach under 


