Jungle Denizens

Letter to the Editor I HAVE read with interest your Febru ary and March issues, with the notes on supposed undiscovered peoples in the interior of Guadalcanal.

The allaged- hair of these mythical creatures, referred to by Mr. A. H. Wil son, consisted of black horse-hair-like strands, which were in fact a species of Marasmius fungus similar to that caus ing witches’ broom cacas, in Trinidad, in the West Indies. As it was collected in the jungle, it is clear that anyone sup plying it as human hair was fully aware of its vegetable origin, and was there fore being deceitful.

Sometime in 1946, an article appeared in the Fiji Agricultural Journal on the Solomon Islands, by an officer temporarily transferred from Uganda. In it he ex pressed surprise that anthropoid apes did not occur in the Solomons. Actually, their presence there would have been most astonishing, as orangutans do not run east of Borneo; and, if they were in the Solomons, they would also be pre sent in New Guinea, between these areas.

Actually, of course, no apes occur in the Pacific, and no sub-human wild man in the Solomon Islands. Just another legend, like the bunyip of Australia!

Your fine cover photograph for Febru ary states that throwing-nets are “peculiar to Polynesia”; but they are very generally used throughout Malaya.

I wonder if they occur between these ex tremes —(it seems highly probable.

I am, etc.,

Malaya, 30/5/1950.

R. A. Lever.