140 MISCELLANEOUS NOTICES. 



" defiant yells, they cut and parried at supposed attacks, 

 " finally throwing down their weapon and taunting the dead 

 " beast by dancing before it unarmed. This done Inas told 

 " rne the carcase was at my disposal. 



•" The death of this tiger now establishes the fact of the 

 " existence of tigers here, for asserting which I have been 

 " pretty frequently laughed at. However, this is not the Ju- 

 " gra pest, a brute whose death would be matter for general 

 " rejoicing, the one now destroyed being a tigress 8 feet long 

 " and 2 feet 8 inches high," 



Breeding Pearls. 



[The following 1 paragraphs respecting i( Breeding Pearls/' 

 extracted from Land and Water under the dates annexed to 

 them, may be of interest.] 



The glass tube now before me, so kindly provided by Her 

 Highness the Ranee of Sarawak as a test of the credulity of 

 the inhabitants of the British Isles, contains a few genuine 

 seed pearls of the Melea^rina and five small marine 

 shells — Cowries or Cyprcea, sub-genus Trivia of Gray, which 

 represent the rice. The specific distinctions of these small 

 trivia are so minute that this individual species has been from 

 time to time variously described. It is the Cyprcea oryza of 

 Linnceus and of Lamarck ; C. intermedia of Kiener • C. in- 

 secta of Mighels, and will doubtless receive other designations 

 from daring conchologists, who. delight in a religious dissent 

 from the opinions of their predecessors. The so-called rice is a 

 marine shell of the genus Cyprcea, the end or apex of each 

 example carefully filed or ground off to represent the effect of 

 having been fed upon by the pearls. The whole is a deliberate 

 and barefaced imposture, and it is to be hoped that when some 

 generations hence this miserable myth again crops up in the 

 repetitive operations of history, some more powerful pen than 

 mine may find employment in denouncing the shameless at- 

 tempt to impose upon the credulity of the scientific world. 



(Signed) Hugh Owen. 

 December 25, 1878. 



