Page:Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (IA journalof51521909150roya).pdf/249

 Groeneveldt'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 奄拔 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 Groeneveldt's "stag" deserves to be recorded along with the "sladang" 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 gaurus) 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 suposedsupposed [sic] by some zoologists to be identical 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 Favre (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.