MeECOUN TS) -OF- THE MALAY ~TAPIR: gg 
Groeneyeldt’s translation) the following account of the mango: 
“There is a kind of mango called by the natives yam-pa ; it is 
“like a pear but a little longer and has a green skin.” 
Yam-pa, which is the sound of the ideographs Ar ie 
in the Mandarin dialect, is meaningless. The Hylam dialect 
however gives us Jam-bu, which is not only excellent Malay 
but shows incidentally that the writer’s memory had deceived 
him into confusing the guava with the mango. 
The passage is interesting in a second respect, for Groene- 
veldt’s ‘‘stag’’ deserves to be recorded along with the “‘sla- 
dang”’ and “ hippopotamus’”’ with which other writers have 
confused the tapir. It was indeed no less an authority than 
Newbold that confused the sladang (the Indian “gaur,” bos 
gawrus) with the tapir. In his “ British Settlements of the 
Straits of Malacca,’ published in 1839, he makes, on page 435 
of the first volume, the following extraordinary statements :— 
“ The seladang is suposed by some zoologists to be identi- 
“cal with the tapir. The Malays however make a difference 
distinguishing the other tapir by the name of tennok. This 
‘is a point desirable to ascertain. The seladang may probably 
“be a variety.” . 
It would have been unfair perhaps to draw attention to 
this slip of Newbold’s if it were not for the fact that it affords 
a curious instance of the extent to which the Malay forests 
were unknown even to the best informed English residents at 
a comparatively recent date. 
More than one early traveller has recorded the hippopotamus 
in the far east. Generally they have I think confused it with 
the rhinoceros or the tapir. Occasionally perhaps they may 
have been misled by the word kuda ayer—(the Malay for the 
little sea-horse, which is not uncommon in these waters) which 
has led the lexicographers sadly astray. Marsden (in 1812), 
Abbé Favee (in 1875) and Swettenham (in (1881) all give kuda 
ayer as hippopotamus, thereby plainly implying that the 
hippopotamus, which of course is only found in Africa, is known 
to the Malays. 
R. A: Soc., No. 52, 1908. 
