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The fauna, however, has not attained to the same exceptionally fine development as the flora. At Rawak the phalanger and the sheepdog in a wild state were the only quadrupeds met with. In Waigiou, the boar called barberossa, and a diminutive of the same race were found.
The vulpine phalanger does duty for a fox; the fat and sleepy little dormouse phalanger takes the place of a European dormouse. Both are so ridiculously like the analogous animals of the larger continents that the colonists always call them, in perfect good faith, by the familiar names of the old-country creatures. The koala poses as a small bear; the cuscus answers to the racoons of America.
Phacochoerus aethiopicus, tusks and pads of. Phalanger, Vulpine, black varieties of the. Phalaropus fulicarius. Phalaropus hyperboreus. Phanaeus. Phanaeus carnifex, variation of the horns of the male. Phanaeus faunus, sexual differences of. Phanaeus lancifer. Phaseolarctus cinereus, taste for rum and tobacco. Phasgonura viridissima, stridulation of. Phasianus Soemmerringii. Phasianus versicolor.
It was a female, and though not exactly of the same species, much resembled the remarkable animal which Mons. de Buffon hath described by the name of phalanger. On the morning of the 29th, the weather becoming calm, and a light breeze having sprung up by land, Lieutenant Cook sent a boat to see what water was upon the bar, and all things were made ready for putting to sea.
Bartlett has seen many black varieties of the jaguar, leopard, vulpine phalanger, and wombat; and he is certain that all, or nearly all these animals, were males. On the other hand, with wolves, foxes, and apparently American squirrels, both sexes are occasionally born black.
"Nothing like it; they do not, indeed, often come down to the ground; but their activity on trees renders them not unworthy of their family." "I thought," observed Lucien, "that bats were the only mammals that could fly." "There is also the flying phalanger," observed my friend; "an animal of the marsupial order, which is a native of Australia, and somewhat resembles the opossum.
Buffon supposes this tribe to be peculiar to America, but in this he is certainly mistaken; and probably, as Pallas has observed in his Zoology, the Phalanger itself is a native of the East Indies, as the animal which was caught by Mr Banks resembled it in the extraordinary conformation of the feet, in which it differs from animals of every other tribe.
Of the quadrupeds, I have already mentioned the dog, and particularly described the kangaroo, and the animal of the opossum kind, resembling the phalanger of Buffon; to which I can add only one more, resembling a pole-cat, which the natives call Quoll: The back is brown, spotted with white, and the belly white unmixed.
At this period domestic animals were not numerous in the Moluccas, but among the wild animals the most curious were the babiroussa, an enormous wild boar with long tusks bent backwards; the opossum, a kind of didelphis a little larger than our squirrel; the phalanger, a marsupial which lives in thick, dark forests, where it feeds upon leaves and fruit; and the tarsier, a kind of jerboa, a very harmless, inoffensive little animal with reddish-coloured hair, about the size of a rat, but whose body bears some resemblance to that of an ape.
As Mr Banks was again gleaning the country for his Natural History on the 26th, he had the good fortune to take an animal of the Opossum tribe: It was a female, and with, it he took two young ones: It was found much to resemble the remarkable animal of the kind which Mons. de Buffon has described in his Natural History by the name of Phalanger, but it was not the same. Mons.
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