Rat, tikus: of the grey kind.
Mouse, tikus kechil.
ELEPHANT.
Elephant, gajah: these huge animals abound in the woods, and from their gregarious habits usually traversing the country in large troops together, prove highly destructive to the plantations of the inhabitants, obliterating the traces of cultivation by merely walking through the grounds; but they are also fond of the produce of their gardens, particularly of plantain-trees and the sugar-cane, which they devour with eagerness. This indulgence of appetite often proves 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 coconut-trees in order to devour the tender part or cabbage.