This is all that we need ask to account for the very scanty and fragmentary group of Mammalia which now inhabit the large island of Timor.

The deer may very probably have been introduced by man, for the Malays often keep tame fawns; and it may not require a thousand, or even five hundred years, to establish new characters in an animal removed to a country so different in climate and vegetation as is Timor from the Moluccas.

I have not mentioned horses, which are often thought to be wild in Timor, because there are no grounds whatever for such a belief.

The Timor ponies have every one an owner, and are quite as much domesticated animals as the cattle on a South American hacienda.
I have dwelt at some length upon the origin of the Timorese fauna because it appears to be a most interesting and instructive problem.

It is very seldom that we can trace the animals of a district so clearly as we can in this case to two definite sources, and still more rarely that they furnish such decisive evidence of the time, the manner, and the proportions of their introduction.