Australasia -- Description and travel; Australasia -- Discovery and exploration; Explorers -- Australasia
The larger and more western islands of the Malay Archipelago have
a fauna of beasts, birds, and reptiles, fish and insects, spiders
and land crabs as remarkable as the wealth of their flora, and next
to Africa the richest in the world. Here may still be seen--in
Borneo--the wild Indian elephant and a two-horned rhinoceros;
in Java there is a tiger and a small form of one-horned Indian
rhinoceros. In Borneo exists the large red-haired ape called
Orang-utan; in Java there are smaller anthropoid apes known as
Gibbons. Java and Borneo both have a handsome wild ox, the Banteng,
besides more or less wild long-horned Indian buffaloes. The smallest
and most remarkable of all the buffaloes is the Anoa, found only
on the island of Celebes, and a larger but similar short-horned
buffalo is found in the Philippines. Nearly all the islands have
wild swine--generally of a type near to the wild boar, but with a
very long head--the parent form of the domestic pig of Polynesia.
But the queer island of Celebes, and Buru, which lies to the east,
possess the strangest pig in the world: the Babirusa, a type
with--for pigs--a small and slender head and (in the male) tusks
which grow up and out through the cheeks. In Borneo there is a large
monkey with an immense drooping nose; in Celebes a creature called
the Black Ape--an intermediate form between baboons, macaques, and
the higher apes. The macaque monkeys--creatures with short tails and
bare faces, rather like small baboons (the Gibraltar monkey is a
macaque)--are very common throughout Malaysia, extending as near to
New Guinea and Australia as the islands of Buru and Timor. The other
monkeys belong to the _Semnopithecus_ genus, the long-tailed sacred
monkeys of India. One of these found in Borneo is a combination
in colouring of black, white, and chestnut red. The more northern
and western of the Malay Islands possess a few strange lemurs, a
large flying creature, the colugo, allied to lemurs and bats, and
the Tupaias or squirrel-tailed Insectivores. Deer, without any
white spots and related to the Sambar type of India, are found in
the Philippines, Borneo, Java, the eastern Sunda Islands as far as
Timor, Celebes, and the Moluccas; and in the Philippines there are
spotted deer like the hog deer of India. Carnivorous mammals are
represented more especially by a small tiger and a leopard in Java,
the Clouded tiger of Borneo (a kind of leopard), several small cats,
numerous civets, a small bear, and wild dogs. Cats and civets extend
their range to Timor and the Philippines, and a civet--probably
brought by the Malays--is found in Celebes. The fruit-eating bats or
flying foxes are very large, often attaining to 5 feet across the
wings. Their range extends eastwards beyond the Solomon Islands to
north-east Australia and the New Hebrides. Nearly all the Pacific
islands, including New Zealand and Hawaii, have bats of their
own, but they are insect-eating, and very often day-flying. In
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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