194 
ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS. 
Cuvier; our acquaintance with the latter is chiefly 
derived from the personal observations of Messrs. Son- 
nini and D'Azara, confirmed by those of later travellers. 
So incomplete and distorted w^ere all previous accounts 
that Linnaeus himself, after having doubtingly admitted 
the Tapir into the tenth edition of his Systema as a 
species of Hippopotamus, tacitly rejected it from the 
twelfth, apparently considering its very existence pro- 
blematical. Buffon, however, had in the mean time 
received some authentic documents concerning it from 
La Condamine, and the figure given by him from a 
drawing by that celebrated traveller furnishes the first 
tolerable likeness extant. A still better representation 
was afterwards obtained from a specimen brought alive 
to France, but which died before reaching Paris, and 
was published, with additional observations (derived 
chiefly from the information of M. Sonnini and from a 
Memoir on the Anatomy of the Tapir by M. Bajon, a 
surgeon of Cayenne), in the sixth supplementary volume 
of the great work of Bufibn. But many of the original 
errors of description were still suffered to exist uncon- 
tradicted, and even M. Allamand's account of two living 
specimens in the Menagerie of the Prince of Orange 
remained imperfect in some of the most essential parti- 
culars. 
From this time until the commencement of the year 
1816, the American Tapir was generally regarded as 
the only species of its genus. Some vague notices had, 
it is true, reached Sir Stamford Raffles of the exist- 
ence of a similar animal in Sumatra and the Malayan 
Peninsula, but to Major Farquhar belongs the credit 
of having first procured a specimen and submitted its 
description to the world at large. The history of this 
transaction affords too striking an illustration of the 
injustice of certain among the French zoologists to the 
