defiant yells, they cut and parried at supposed attacks, finally throwing down their weapon and taunting the dead beast by dancing before it unarmed. This done Tuas told me the carcase was at my disposal.
"The death of this tiger now establishes the fact of the existence of tigers here, for asserting which I have been pretty frequently laughed at. However, this is not the Jugra pest, a brute whose death would be matter for general rejoicing, the one now destroyed being a tigress 8 feet long and 2 feet 8 inches high."
BREEDING PEARLS.
[The following paragraphs respecting "Breeding Pearls," extracted from Land and Water under the dates annexed to them, may be of interest.]
The glass tube now before me, so kindly provided by Her Highness the Ranee of Sarawak as a test of the credulity of the inhabitants of the British Isles, contains a few genuine seed pearls of the Meleagrina and five small marine shells—Cowries or Cypraea, sub-genus Trivia of Gray, which represent the rice. The specifice distinctions of these small trivia are so minute that this individual species has been from time to time variously described. It is the Cypren oryza of Linnaeus and of Lamarck; C. intermedia of Kiener; C. insecta of Mighels, and will doubtless receive other designations from daring conchologists, who delight in a religious dissent from the opinions of their predecessors. The so-called rice is a marine shell of the genus Cypraea, the end or apex of each example carefully filed or ground off to represent the effect of having been fed upon by the pearls. The whole is a deliberate and barefaced imposture, and it is to be hoped that when some generations hence this miserable myth again crops up in the repetitive operations of history, some more powerful pen than mine may find employment in denouncing the shamieless attempt to impose upon the credulity of the scientific world.
December 25, 1878.
