Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/490

484

earlier building, and is to be connected with it by a wide gallery passing from behind the main staircase. Each building measures about 250 feet long by 50 feet wide; the cost of both buildings amounts to about $100,000. Building, it will be seen, is distinctly less expensive than in the Occident!

The site of the museum is in a small city park. Entering the building from the town side, one passes into a spacious rotunda well filled with cases, and giving one the preliminary color of the local fauna. Prominent, for example, is a tiger fairly we I mounted, and with a jungly background. This huge creature had been, I was told, the household pet of a local Rajah. One may mention, incidentally, that the tiger is decidedly on the increase in the Malay Peninsula, indeed even in the immediate neighborhood of Singapore. The collection of insects in the museum is important. In the rotunda is a series of native beetles and orthopters, including among the former, wonderful longicorns and Scarabœids; and, among the orthopters, the best examples I have seen of leaf insects and walkingsticks. At one side of the rotunda is the entrance of the Raffles library (now grown to 30,000 volumes), which is devoted largely to works dealing with local natural history and ethnology. At the back of the rotunda, one ascends the stairs and enters the natural-history gallery and the ethnological rooms. Among noteworthy exhibits I recall the collection of local butterflies and moths, and a series, possibly the best extant, of paradise birds. The reptiles include turtles, crocodiles, and a great number of local snakes. The cases containing the gibbon and