oves fatal to them, for
the owners, knowing their attachment to these vegetables, have a practice
of poisoning some part of the plantation, by splitting the canes and
putting yellow arsenic into the clefts which the animal unwarily eats of,
and dies. Not being by nature carnivorous, the elephants are not fierce,
and seldom attack a man but when fired at or otherwise provoked.
Excepting a few kept for state by the king of Achin, they are not tamed
in any part of the island.

RHINOCEROS.

The rhinoceros, badak, both that with a single horn and the double-horned
species, are natives of these woods. The latter has been particularly
described by the late ingenious Mr. John Bell (one of the pupils of Mr.
John Hunter) in a paper printed in Volume 83 of the Philosophical
Transactions for 1793. The horn is esteemed an antidote against poison,
and on that account formed into drinking cups. I do not know anything to
warrant the stories told of the mutual antipathy and the desperate
encounters of these two enormous beasts.

HIPPOPOTAMUS.

Hippopotamus, kuda ayer: the existence of this quadruped in the island of
Sumatra having been questioned by M. Cuvier, and not having myself
actually seen it, I think it necessary to state that the immediate
authority upon which I included it in the list of animals found there was
a drawing made by Mr. Whalfeldt, an officer employed on a survey of the
coast, who had met with it at the mouth of one of the southern rivers,
and transmitted the sketch along with his report to the government, of
which I was then secretary. Of its general resemblance to that well-known
animal there could be no doubt. M. Cuvier suspects that I may have
mistaken for it the animal called by naturalists the dugong, and vulgarly
the sea-cow, which will be hereafter mentioned; and it would indeed be a
grievous error to mistake for a beast with four legs, a fish with two
pectoral fins serving the purposes of feet; but, independently of the
authority I have stated, the kuda ayer, or river-horse, is familiarly
known to the natives, as is also the duyong (from which Malayan word the
dugong of naturalists has been corrupted); and I have only to add that,
in a register given by the Philosophical Society of Batavia in the first
Volume of their Transactions for 1799, appears the article "couda aijeer,
rivier paard, hippopotamus" amongst the animals of Java.

BEAR, ETC.

Bear, bruang: generally small and black: climbs the cocon