I Obtained A Tolerably Perfect Cranium, And A
Number Of Teeth, Which Were Picked Up By The Natives.
Another curious animal, which I had met with in Singapore and in
Borneo, but which was more abundant here, is the Galeopithecus,
or flying lemur.
This creature has a broad membrane extending all
aound its body to the extremities of the toes, and to the point
of the rather long tail. This enables it to pass obliquely
through the air from one tree to another. It is sluggish in its
motions, at least by day, going up a tree by short runs of a few
feet, and then stopping a moment as if the action was difficult.
It rests during the day clinging to the trunks of trees, where
its olive or brown fur, mottled with irregular whitish spots and
blotches, resembles closely the colour of mottled bark, and no
doubt helps to protect it. Once, in a bright twilight, I saw one
of these animals run up a trunk in a rather open place, and then
glide obliquely through the air to another tree, on which it
alighted near its base, and immediately began to ascend. I paced
the distance from the one tree to the other, and found it to be
seventy yards; and the amount of descent I estimated at not more
than thirty-five or forty feet, or less than one in five. This I
think proves that the animal must have some power of guiding
itself through the air, otherwise in so long a distance it would
have little chance of alighting exactly upon the trunk.
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