158 MISCELLANEOUS NOTES. 



Mr. A. E. Wallace has commented, somewhere in his works, 

 on this puzzling fact in animal distribution, and he has suggested 

 that the tiger may have been a denizen of the jungles of Borneo in 

 former days, and that it has subsequently become extinct from 

 causes at present un explain able. This is, of course, a purely 

 hypothetical solution of the problem. Another one occurs to 

 me — also hypothetical, but also possible — viz., that the tiger may 

 be a comparatively recent immigrant southwards on this side of 

 Asia ; and that, by the time it had extended its range to the latitude 

 of the extremity of the Peninsula, the insulation of Borneo from 

 the mainland by submergence of the intervening area may have 

 already reached to such an extent, as to render it no longer possible 

 for the animal to effect a lodgment on the island, even by dint of 

 its well-known power of swimming across wide straits of water. 



Whatever the true explanation of its absence, it is worth while 

 recording the fact that there is a widespread tradition of a large car- 

 nivorous animal among the tribes that people the" North- West Coast 

 of Borneo. Without paying any special attention to these stories, I 

 have yet come across them several times. When visiting the Serimbo 

 mountain in Sarawak in 1870 some Land Dyaks voluntarily retailed 

 to me an account of large tigers (hurl man) which they had heard 

 described by the old men of their tribe, and in whose existence they 

 themselves firmly believed. The animals, they said, were of great 

 size, having hair a foot in length of a reddish colour striped with 

 black, and they had their lairs in the great caves of the district. 

 This account agreed exactly with another which I had heard from 

 the Balan Dyaks (Sea Dyaks) of the Semunjan river, who declared 

 that a pair of these animals haunted a cave in the Pupok hill. Sub- 

 sequently I again heard these Pupok tigers spoken of by another 

 party of the same Dyaks, who lived close to the hill. Spenser St. 

 John (vol. ii., p. 107), when travelling among the Muruts of the 

 Linbang river, met with a similar story of large tigers inhabiting 

 caves, which he gives at length, and adds the remark, "it is worth 

 " noticing that the Muruts of Padas have a great dread of ascending 



