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The Baldwin Library
FIGHT BETWEEN AN ELEPHANT AND A TIGER
POPULAR
NATURA EIStORny
FOR BOYS AND GIRLS
BY
W. J. GORDON
AUTHOR OF ‘OUR COUNTRY’S BIRDS’ ‘HOW LONDON LIVES ETC.
WITH EIGHTY-SIX ENGRAVINGS
LONDON
THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY
56 PATERNOSTER Row aNp 65 ST Paut’s CuurcuyarpD
1894
CONTENTS
ANTHROPOIDEA
Chimpanzee .
Gorilla
Orang
Gibbons
Monkeys
Baboons
Hanuman
Langurs
’ Macaques
Chacma
Spider Monkeys
Capuchin Monkeys
pense :
EMUROIDEA .
Lemurs .
Aye-aye
CHIROPTER A
Bats .
Fox-Bat
Insectivorous Bats
Vampire Bat .
INSECTIVORA .
Shrews .
Mole
CARNIVORA .
Lion. .
Tiger
SS nclal
CHAPTER I
MAMMALS
PAGE
17, | CARNIVORA (ae) )—
19 Leopard . ;
22 | Ounce
27 Jaguar
29 Puma
32 | Cats .
33° | Civet
36 Hyeena
37 Dog
38 Wolf
40 | Jackal
43 | Fox .
44 | Brown Bear
47 Polar Bear
48 Grizzly Bear .
48 Black Bear
52 | Panda
54 Marten
54 |} Polecat .
56 Weasel
58 Skunk
64 Badger
64 Otter
66 Sea-Lion .
66 Sea-Bear
67 Walrus
70 Sea- pe
76 Seal
108
RODENTIA
Squirrel
Marmot
Beaver
Mouse .
Rat .
Porcupine
Hare
Rabbit .
CETACEA
Whales .
Narwhal
Dolphin
Porpoise .
UNGULATA
Cattle
Bison
Bighorn
Horned Sheep
Goat.
Antelope
Giraffe
Deer
Elk .
Reindeer
Moose
CARINAT AE
Dipper .
Song birds
Nightingale
Mocking-bird
Skylark.
Thrush :
Birds of Paradise
Woodpecker
THumming-birds
Parrots
Owls
Vultures
Hawks .
CONTENTS
PAGE
. 1 | UNGULATA (cont.)\—
. III Camel :
cele Liama
. 114 Pig : B
. 118 Hippopotamus .
. 120 Tapir ,
. 120 Horse
Bel 22 Zebra
., 122 Ass .
. 123 Rhinoceros
. 123 Hyrax
. 127 Elephant
. 129 | SZRENIA
. 129 Manati .
. 130 Dugong.
. 133 | EDENTATA
» 134 Sloth
. 134 Ant-eater
Bel o4 Armadillo .
. 139 Pangolin .
. 139 | MARSOPIALIA .
ASTad ad Opossum
- 145 Kangaroo . ‘
. 145 | MONOTREMATA
. 148 | Duckmole .
. 148 Echidna
CHAPTER II
BIRDS
. 194 | CARINAT HAE (cont.)-—
. 196 Pelicans : a
. 196 Storks
. 200 Flamingoes
. 200 Geese
- 201 Ducks
» 201 Gulls
. 202 Condor
. 205 | RATITA.
. 206 Ostrich
. 206 Rhea
. 207 Emu.
. 207 Kiwi
. 207 | SAURURA.
PAGE
- 149
- 154
- 154
. 156
. 158
- 159
. 161
. 162
. 162
. 167
. 168
- 173
» 174
» 174
» 175
- 175
. 176
. 177
. 178
» 179
. 180
. 182
. 184
. 185
. 186
. 208
. 208
. 208
. 208
. 208
. 209
. 210
. 215
. 216
. 216
. 216
. 216
. 217
CROCODILIA .
Crocodiles.
Gharials
Alligators .
OPHIDIA
Rattlesnake
Vipers
Sea-Snakes
Hamadryad
Cobras
ECAUDATA
Frogs 3
Horned Frogs
Toads
TELEOSTEI
Perch
Bream
Shad.
Archer-fish
Weevers
Mackerel .
Sword-fish
Angler-fish
Stickleback
Cod . :
Turbot .
Herring
Cat-fish .
Carp.
Salmon .
CONTENTS
CHAPTER III
REPTILES
PAGE
- 219 | OPHIDIA (cont.)—
. 219 Boas f
. 220 Pythons :
yee 221 | LACHER TTL Id +
222 Lizards
. 225 Blindworm
. 226 Chameleon
. 226 | CHELONIA
e227: Tortoises .
. 227 Turtles .
CHAPTER IV
AMPHIBIANS
- 235 | CAUDATA .
» 235 Newt
» 235 Salamander
. 235 | APODA
CHAPTER V
FISHES
» 240 | TELEOSTET (cont.)—
. 241 Arapaima .
» 241 Pilchard
. 241 | Sardine
2A Qe Sea-horse
- 242 | GANOIDES.
e242 tel Sturgeon
224301 Pike
. 246 | DIPNOT
. 246 | Barramunda :
- 247°, ELASMOBRANCA/
- 247 Sharks F
. 247 Saw-fish
PAY, Rays
. 248 Skate
« 248 Eagle-Ray
vii
PAGE
. 228
. 228
. 228
. 228
. 230
. 230
. 230
- 231
ma2gr
. 238
. 238
- 239
» 239
. 248
. 249
+ 249
- 249
. 250
. 250
» 250
Zoid
. 251
e252
. 252
» 254
» 255
» 255
» 255
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Giraffes '
PAGE
Fight between an Elephant and
a Tiger frontispiece
A young Chimpanzee 14
_ The Gorilla : : 19
The White-collared Mangabey 38
The Red-faced Spider ro 45
Marmosets . 5 49
The Brown Mouse-Lemur 50
Skeleton of Bat. . : 55
The Collared Fruit-Bat . 57
Head of Long-eared Bat 59
Long-eared Bats F 60
Long-eared Bat sleeping 61
Barbastelle Bat walking . 62
Head of Vampire Bat 63
Water Shrews 65
Skeleton of a Lion 69
Lions 5 71
Lioness and Cubs 75
Leopards 78
A Puma 81
Eskimo Dogs 90
A Group of Fennecs . 92
The Polar Bear 95
The Grizzly Bear . 97
Grizzly Bear in a Aap 99
Black Bear IOI
The Otter 103
The Walrus 105
The Northern Sea-Bear . . 109
The Russian Biying Pai » 115
Beavers Sly
Field Voles . 119
Harvest Mice I2T
The Porcupine . SIpl22)
The Narwhal . 128
A School of Porpoises . 131
The American Bison - 135
The Musk Ox . . 136
The Alpine Ibex . 138
The Cabul Markhor . . 140
Head of Gemsbok. » 141
Water-Buck . 142
» 145
PAGE
Reindeer . - 147
The Moose » 149
Camels . I51
Llamas . : - 153
The Hog-Deer of Celebes Beeesee ici
The Common Hippopotamus . 157
Skull of the Hippopotamus . 158
Skeleton of the Horse . 160
Indian Rhinoceros - 163
The Hyrax or Coney - 168
The Great Ant-cater . . 176
Opossum with its Young . 181
Kangaroos . 183
The Duckmole . 185
Lawes’s Echidna . 187
The Ostrich . : . 188
Skeleton of a Bird . 190
Breastbone of Owl . I9QI
Parts of a Bird . . 192
A Bird’s Leg . 193
The Dipper Tals
The Nightingale =. 197,
The Blackcap . 198
The Reed Warbler « 199
Shooting Birds of Paradise . 203
Weaver Bird and Nest . 204
The Nightjar. 205
The Sword-bill Humming- Bird 208
The Concave Hornbill . 207
The Griffon Vulture owe TT
The Kiwi. ; . 217
Head of a Crocodile . 220
Head of a Gharial . 220
Head of an Alligator A221
The Tiger-snake of Australia . 223
Skeleton of a Python . 224
The Rattlesnake . 226
The Cobra di Capello o5 227,
The Moloch Lizard . 229
The Matamata . 232
Transformations of the hi rog . 237
The Nest of the Stickleback . 245
The Hammer-headed Shark . 253
A BRIEF EXPLANATION OF SOME OF THE
SCIENTIFIC TERMS USED IN THIS BOOK
As the paraphrases adopted in many popular natural history books are
more or less incorrect, it has been decided in the present volume
to give the proper scientific terms. This compels the use of some-
what long words, such as ‘anthropoidea,’ ‘carnivora,’ &c. To
enable the young reader to understand exactly what these mean, a
brief glossary is here given. It is hoped that this may help beginners
to make an intelligent use of the book, and also afford pleasant
exercise in the way of word study.
Albinism, The absence of the usual colouring matters in the skin and
its appendages.
Anchylosis, The union of two bony surfaces by osseous or fibrous
matter.
Anoura. An old term for the tailless Amphibians.
Anthropoidea. Those monkeys which most nearly approach man in
form.
Antlers, The horns of the deer. ;
Agoda. Animals without limbs; the worm-like Amphibians.
Artiodactyla. Ungulates having an even number of toes on their fect.
Atavism. The recurrence of an ancestral peculiarity.
Atrophied. Arrested in development at an early period of growth.
Atlas. The vertebra of the neck which directly supports the skull.
Axis. The second vertebra of the neck, on which the skull and atlas
generally work. :
Baleen. Whalebone.
Batrachia. An old name for the Frogs, Toads, Salamanders, &c.
Brachium. The upper arm.
Branchia, The gill of a fish 3 an organ adapted for breathing the air
dissolved in water.
Bronchi. The branches of the windpipe by which air is conveyed to
the lung vesicles.
Bruta. An old name of the Edentates.
Canide. Dog-like animals.
Canine. The eye-tooth (see Dental Formula).
Carinate. Birds with a sharp breast-bone, like a keel (cavéa).
Carnassials, The flesh teeth of the Carnivores.
Carnivora. The animals which feed on flesh.
x BRIEF EXPLANATION OF SCIENTIFIC TERMS
Carpus. The wrist.
Catarrhine. Narrow-nosed; a term applied to the monkeys of the
Eastern Hemisphere.
Caudata. The tailed Amphibians, such as Newts and Salamanders.
Cavicorns. The hollow-horned Ruminants, such as oxen and sheep.
Cervical. Pertaining to the neck.
Cetacea. The whales and dolphins.
Chelonia. The tortoises, turtles, &c.
Chiroptera. The hand-winged mammals ; that is to say, the Bats.
Chordates. Animals having a spinal cord.
Coleoptera. An order of insects including the beetles.
Clavicles. The collar-bones ; the bones that together form the merry-
thought in birds.
Coccyx. The lower end of the spinal column.
Condyle. The surface by which one bone articulates with another.
Coracotd. The bone in the shoulder-girdle, which is a mere process of
the scapula in mammals, but is well developed in birds.
Coriaceous. Leathery.
Costal. Pertaining to the ribs.
Creodonta. Primitive carnivores, whose lower molar teeth are generally
shaped like flesh-teeth. (See Dental Formula.)
Cuspfidate. Waving small pointed elevations or ‘ cusps.’
Cutaneous. Pertaining to the skin.
Dental Formula. A short method of describing the number and de-
scription of the teeth. Adult man, for instance, has 32 teeth, of
which 16 are in the upper jaw and 16 in the lower. Each set of
16 consists of 4 ‘incisors’ in front, then 2 ‘canines,’ one on each
side, then 4 ‘premolars,’ 2 on each side, and then 6 ‘molars,’
being 3 on each side. As there are the same number of teeth in
each half-jaw, the set can be briefly tabulated as incisors 2, canines 1,
premolars 2, molars 3; or for upper and lower jaws 7. 2, c. 4,
p.m. 2, m. %; but as the series is always in the same order the
letters can be dispensed with, and the formula further abbreviated
into 2428, In man both jaws have the same number of teeth, but
this is not the case among all the mammals. The canines are fre-
quently known as the eye-teeth, and the premolars as the bicuspids.
Dermal. Pertaining to the integument,
Dextral, Right-handed.
Diastema. A gap, such as the interval in the jaw of the Ruminants.
Diastole, The expansion of a contractile cavity.
Didelphia, Another name for the Marsupials.
Differentiation, The separation of parts which are united in siinpler
forms of life.
Digit. A finger or toe.
Diphyodont, Waving two sets of teeth.
Dipnot. Double-breathing fishes.
Dorsal. Pertaining to the back.
Ldentata, Mammals which have no front or incisor teeth,
BRIEF EXPLANATION OF SCIENTIFIC TERMS xi
Elasmobranchti. Fishes having gills like plates.
Eocene. The lowest division of the Tertiary rocks.
felide., Cat-like animals.
femur. The thigh-bone.
fibula. The outer bone of the leg.
frssipeds. The carnivora in which the toes are divided, as among the
cats and dogs.
furculum. The merrythought, which is formed of the united
clavicles.
Ganoidet. Fishes which have enamelled bony scales.
fabitat, The locality in which an animal naturally lives,
fHfallux. The great toe.
ffeterocercal. Unequally lobed.
Humerus. The bone of the upper arm,
4fyoid. The bone which supports the tongue.
Llium. The haunch bone.
fnguinal. Pertaining to the groin.
Lnsectivora. Animals which feed on insects.
Lnvertebrata. Animals without a backbone.
Lacertilia, Lizard-like animals (Zacertus, a lizard).
Larynx. The upper part of the windpipe, from which the voice is
produced in mammals.
Lemuroidea. Animals of which the lemur is the type.
Ligamentum nuche. The neck ligament which supports the head.
Lingual. Pertaining to the tongue.
Lumbar. Pertaining to the loins.
Alammatia, The vertebrate animals which suckle their young.
Mandible. The lower jaw. ~
Marsupialia. Mammals which carry their young in a pouch, like the
kangaroo. :
AMaxitila. The upper jaw.
Alelanism, An excess of colouring matters in the skin and its appen-
dages, thus producing blackness.
Molars. The grinder teeth.
Monophyodont. Waving only one set of teeth.
Neural. Pertaining to the nerves.
Nidification, _Nest-building.
Notochord. The chorda dorsalis, a longitudinal cellular rod developed
beneath the spinal cord, and replaced by the vertebral column
in the adults of such animals as have a backbone.
Odontoceti, The toothed whales.
Bsophagus. The gullet.
Oral. Pertaining to the mouth.
Opposable. That which may be opposed. A word used incorrectly as
descriptive of the power of the human subject to grip with the
thumb and second digit. It is impossible to ‘ oppose’ these in the
strict sense of the word, as the thumb must press sideways on the
forefinger and cannot be twisted so as to get in front of it. An
xii BRIEF EXPLANATION OF SCIENTIFIC TERMS
‘opposable toe’ is a great toe capable of being used in the way
that a thumb is. Owing to the invention of boots and sandals, the
great toe of man is now almost parallel in its action to that of the
second toe, but among savage races like the Zulus the spears are
picked up between the toes, and some of the natives of the West
Coast of Africa have the great toe-joint still so flexible that they can
use a hammer with their feet.
Ophidia. Snake-like animals.
Paleontology. The science of fossils.
Paleozoic. The oldest group of stratified rocks.
Patella. The knee-cap.
Pelvis. The division of the skeleton which consists of the sacrum,
coccyx, and haunch bones.
Lerissodactyla. Ungulates having an odd number of toes in their feet.
Pinnipeds. The Carnivores in which the toes are joined together, as
for example, the seals.
Plagiostomt. The fishes with the transverse mouths.
Pleistocene. The most recent rocks of the Tertiary period.
Platyrrhine. Broad-nosed; a term applied to the monkeys of the
Western Hemisphere.
Pollex. The thumb.
Prehensile. Capable of grasping.
Ramus. A half of the lower jaw.
Ratite. Birds with a flat breast-bone, like a raft (vatzs).
Rodentia. The animals that gnaw, sometimes called the Glres.
Saurure. Birds with lizard-like tails. Only fossil specimens known.
Ruminants. The animals that chew the cud.
Sacrum. The triangular bone at the base of the vertebral column
which forms the keystone of the pelvic arch.
Scapula. The shoulder-bone.
Simiide. Ape-like creatures (Greek. szvzos, ¢ flat-nosed ’).
Sirenta. Mammals, like the dugong, that live in the water (from
S2v€n).
Sternum. The breast-bone.
Tarsus. The ankle.
Teleostez. The bony fishes.
Thorax. The.chest.
Tibia. The shin-bone.
Ungulata. Animals which have hoofs.
Ventral. Pertaining to the under surface of the vertebrates.
Vertebrates. The animals having a backbone.
Viviparous. Bringing forth the young alive.
A YOUNG CHIMPANZEE
POPULAR NATURAL HISTORY
FOR BOYS AND GIRLS
CEA Pl Resi
MAMMALS
THERE are over two million species of animals on
this earth, and if we were merely to print their names,
we should have to mass eight thousand of them on
every page of this book. The numbers are, in fact,
so appalling and incomprehensible that it is simply
beyond human powers to realise the immensity and
variety of the mighty Creation amid which we live.
The wonderful is not necessarily the unknown ; in>
the known we have the wonderful with us.
The Creation has a long history, lost in the depths
of ages marked by constant change and continuous
life. The millions of forms that we know to-day are
but as nothing in comparison with those which have
vanished for ever in the onward march. Onward
unrestingly has come the great army of the living,
each form rising to suit its environment, and
failing as its environment was modified; Nature
16 MAMMALS
everywhere testifying to the infinity of its Author ;
never a living form transmitting its unaltered like-
ness to distant futurity, and yet nothing in the end
which was not also in the beginning. Truly a
wonderful world as it lies open to us, modelled and
moulded, as a whole and in its least molecule, with
grandeur, unfathomable intelligence, and inexhausti-
ble bounty.
During our lifetime our knowledge of animal life
in the present and the past has largely increased, and
the hard-and-fast frontier lines drawn by our fathers
have in many cases been wiped away, and in others
have been replaced by mere strips of debateable land.
Even among the greater divisions which seemed so
firmly established, many approximations have been
made out. The fishes, for instance, have been found
to be closely allied to the amphibians, the reptiles to
the birds, and even the vertebrates as a whole have
been shown to be so linked to the invertebrates that
zoologists are abandoning the backbone as a basis of
classification in favour of the spinal cord. Animals
are now sorted into chordates, hemi-chordates and so
on, and non-chordates ; the spinal cord in the chordates
being along the back, and the heart being ventral, while
the nerve cords of the non-chordates are along the
belly or the sides, the heart being dorsal; the inter-
mediate classes giving the intermediate stages in
which the animal forms appear to have gradually
turned upside down. On such technical details we
need not, however, dwell in this little book ; we have
merely mentioned them as illustrations of the ex-
ANTHROPOIDEA i7
treme unwisdom of arguing on the undiscovered, and
putting our trust in boundary lines.
The one central fact is the unity of creation.
The division into species-is merely a grouping of
individuals, no two of which are exactly alike, made
by man himself for his convenience in study and
treatment. He groups individuals into varieties,
varieties into species, species into genera, genera into
families, families into orders, orders into classes, and
at every stage is at the mercy of some fresh discovery,
if he has been presumptuous enough to act upon the
unknown. It is for this reason that natural-history
books go out of date, for no classification is on a
sound basis which is dependent on the assumed
absence of certain features or forms.
ANTHROPOIDEA.—From a man’s point of
view the animais highest in the scale of life are those
most like himself. He has a backbone, and con-
sequently he considers animals with a backbone to
_ be in a higher stage of development than those with-
q
out one. He is mammalian, and therefore puts the
mammals at the head of the vertebrate series, with
the birds on his flank, and the reptiles, amphibians,
and fishes following after. And in this arrangement
he is confirmed by the records of the rocks, which
have yielded so many intermediate forms, and which—
with their crowd of mammaliain their more recent beds,
the first appearance of reptiles at an earlier age, of
amphibians at a still earlier, of fishes at a still earlier,
and the persistence of invertebrates throughout, with
the obvious evidence of a gradual advance from the
B
18 MAMMALS
generalised to the specialised—have established the
theory of his classification on so broad a basis that
discussion as to the main question has practically
ceased, and the conflict now rages around the
secondary means. by which the changes have been
brought about.
Adopting, then, the usual plan, let us begin with
the animals between whom and ourselves there is, as
Sir Richard Owen said, ‘an all-prevailing similitude
of structure’ which is unmistakable, and an external
resemblance, particularly in their youth, which has in
all parts of the world procured for them among savage
races the local names of ‘wild men,’ ‘little men,’
‘hairy men, &c, by which we in so many cases
know them.
In the front rank of these come the chimpanzees,
the gorillas, the orangs, and the gibbons. These are
‘the man-like apes, the Szzéd@, which, with the old-
world monkeys, the American monkeys, and the
marmosets, form four out of five of the families of the
man-like animals included in the order of Anthro-
potdea ; the fifth family being the Homenide, to which
man, the type of the order, belongs. Opinions differ
as to which of the Szw#eczde@ should head the group.
The gorillas are most like man in size, but the
gibbons, which are not above three feet high, have
a much more human-looking skull, without ridges
or crests, and with a nearly upright forehead and a
well-shaped chin. The gorilla’s arms reach half-way
down his shins, but the arms of the gibbons are so
long that they can touch their toes with their fingers
as they walk ; and the gibbons can walk upright and
THE GORILLA 19
flat-footed at all ages, while the gorilla rarely walks
upright, except in infancy. In the structure of the
brain the orangs are most like man; but in other
respects, in the arms and hands and feet, and in the
THE GORILLA
jaws, the chimpanzees are so tnuch closer to the
human type that it is usual to begin with them.
There are two living species of chimpanzee now
recognised, zzger (the black) and caluus (the bald),
B2
20 MAMMALS
both being natives of Western and Central Africa.
The genus is known as Axthropopithecus, which
means the man-monkey. Chimpanzee itself should
really be written chimpa n’zee the n’see, being the
word now rendered as n’tyigo, the chzmpa being
descriptive of the sort of n’tyigo the natives wished
to distinguish. The generic name used to be 7vog-
lodytes, or ‘dwellers in caves, but this has gone the
way of Quadrumana and other familiar terms, as
being misleading when insisted upon too closely.
The chimpanzee is, in fact, not a cave-dweller but a
tree-dweller, and his home is a sort of platform, with
or without a roof, which he makes in the trees for the
shelter of his family. ‘ With regard to the arboreal
habits of the gorilla, writes Dr. Garner, ‘I think they
are somewhat misunderstood. He is a good climber
and evidently spends much of his time in trees; but
from an examination of his foot it is evident that he
was designed for terrestrial habits. The grasping
power of his foot is much less than that of the chim-
panzee, and is not at all to be compared in this respect
with his own hand; and all men whom I have
consulted upon this point agree with me that he
spends most of his life on the ground. During the
time that I kept a young gorilla in the bush with me,
I had also a chimpanzee ; and it was the daily habit
of the chimpanzee to climb about in the bushes,
while the gorilla rarely ever ascended one. I always
kept a supply of food for them where they could easily
secure it themselves at any time ; but the gorilla would
seldom climb even a few feet from the ground to
get himself a plantain, and when he did so, always
THE CHIMPANZEE 2t
descended again to the ground to eat it, whereas the
chimpanzee would occasionally take a banana and
climb into the bush to eat it. Both of these animals,
however, and also the native, climb in much the
same manner. They hold on to the sides of the
tree with the hands, place the bottom of the foot
obliquely on the side next to them, and walk up it,
meanwhile depending in a great degree on the big
toe. This toe, however, is very much larger in the
chimpanzee than in man ; itis, indeed, like the thumb,
one of the most variable characters of this group of
animals, and in the marmosets is nearly wanting
altogether.
The chimpanzee squats on his heels, the gorilla
sits down like a man, and sticks his legs out in front
of him. The male chimpanzee is five feet high at
the most, and the female is nearly as big, whereas the
male gorilla, who may exceed six feet in height, is
always much larger than the female. But the great
difference is in the faces, that of the gorilla having
the powerful brow-ridges which make him look so
brutish and ferocious, which ridges, like the crest on
the top of the skull, are almost absent in the females
and their young, and only grow into prominence as
the males approach maturity. The chimpanzees
have their eyebrows much less marked in both sexes,
and are altogether of more graceful build and
pleasanter appearance.
‘Sally, who lived for eight years at the Zoological
Gardens in the, Regent’s Park, was one of the bald
species. The experiments made on her by Dr.
Romanes are well known. She was apparently about
22 MAMMALS
as intelligent as a child might be within the last few
months of infancy, and had some notion of numbers
up to ten; but as far as her ‘language’ was dis-
coverable, it was limited to three sounds, one doing
duty for ‘Yes, another for ‘No, and another for
‘Thank you so much!’ She may, however, have
realised that ‘a still tongue makes a wise head ;’ at
any rate, like the little black chimpanzee now in her
place, she looked wise enough, particularly when boys
attempted to amuse themselves at her expense.
The gorilla (Gorlla Savage?) is so called after its
native name, the name of the species being in honour
of Dr. Savage, an English missionary in the Gaboon
country, who in 1847 sent drawings of its skull to
Sir Richard Owen. Du Chaillu published his account
of his discovery of this huge ape in 1861, but in 1860
there was a real live gorilla in this country in a
travelling show, whose proprietor was unaware of the
curiosity he possessed until after it was dead.
The gorilla is heavily built, as can be seen by the
skeletons in the top gallery at the Natural History
Museum at South Kensington, but this heaviness has
been exaggerated in most of the published woodcuts.
Like man and the chimpanzees, he has seventeen
joints in his backbone; but while man has twelve
ribs, he and the chimpanzees have thirteen. Another
point in which he resembles the chimpanzees is in
the absence of the ‘central’ bone in the wrist, which
is only found exceptionally in adult man. His teeth,
too, though similar in number and variety, are very
different in appearance from a man’s, owing to the
large size of the canines and wisdom teeth.
PEDIGREE OF GORILLA 23
In these comparisons with the human skeleton,
in this ‘stating of the animal kingdom in the terms of
man, it should be borne in mind that we are only
dealing with anatomical facts, and that it is not im-
plied, as the ignorant suppose, that man is descended
from any of the existing chimpanzees or gorillas or
orangs or gibbons. No one, indeed, ever said so, the
statement having been put about by heated dis-
putants in their attempts to destroy the unwelcome
by mere derision. The pedigree of the Homznide
must be taken back for an enormous period of time
before it touches the crossways whence that of the
man-like apes diverged fromit. But those crossways
it unmistakably reaches. Man is so intimately con-
nected, as far as his bodily structure goes, with the
higher apes that, as Mr. Lydekker says in 7ze
Royal Natural History, ‘in this respect at least he
cannot but be considered to have had a similar
origin.’ There is really no fundamental distinction
in anatomy between any member of the man-like
group, and they can only be regarded as diverging
branches from some ancestral form long since extinct,
as much unlike any living ape as such apes are un-
like man.
Of course, much depends on what is meant by
man, but in a zoological sense the Homznzd@ seem to
have been distinct from the Szszz¢de for at least as
long ago as the Miocene period of the earth’s exist-
ence.. This, it need hardly be said, has nothing to do
with the spiritual nature, nor even with the mental
powers and other human attributes, which so far
remove man from the brutes. ‘Viewed from the
24 MAMMALS
anatomical standpoint, says Professor Mivart, ‘man
is but one species of the order Primates; and he
even differs far less from the higher apes than do
these latter from the inferior forms of the order.
This work being purely anatomical, it is only needful
here to remind the reader of what common-sense
teaches us—that to estimate any object as a whole,
its powers of action no less than its structure must be
taken into consideration. The structure of the highest
plants is more complex than is that of the lowest
animals; but for all that, powers are possessed by
jelly-fishes of which oaks and cedars are devoid.
The self-conscious intelligence of man establishes
between him and all other animals a distinction far
wider than the mere superiority of his brain in mass
and complexity, or any other physical difference,
would indicate. ~All, however, who admit the idea of
man’s moral responsibility are logically compelled to
go much further, and to confess that in this respect
he is separated from the rest of the visible creation
by an abyss so vast that no chasm separating the
other kingdoms of nature from one another can be
compared with it.’
The words of the Psalmist, taken in their ordinary
signification, are as eloquent as they are true: ‘When
I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the
moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained ;
What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and
the son of man, that Thou visitest him? For Thou
hast made him but little lower than the angels, and
crownest him with glory and honour. Thou madest
him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands ;
BRAIN OF A GORILLA 25
Thou hast put all things under his feet : all sheep and
oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field ; the fowl of the
air, and the fish of the sea, whatsoever passeth through
the paths of the seas.’
The frame of man differs but little from that of
the living things around him, but his dominion over
them is palpable and undeniable. Year by year those
that might contest it with him, were it a matter of
structure alone, are edged away. The monsters of
the past and the present, the carnivores, the serpents,
every possibly dominant form of the air and land and
sea, struggle in vain against his superiority. And
every wild animal or wild plant that he judges in his
ignorance to be ‘of no use’ he dooms to extinction as
‘vermin’ or ‘ weeds.’
In mere weight of brain he is a long way above
those he most resembles. The gorilla’s brain is only
two-thirds that of the smallest human brain—in fact,
a man may have a brain three times as heavy as that
of the gorilla. The average human brain weighs just
under 50 ounces ; that of the gorilla does not exceed
20 ounces. The cranial capacity. is never less than
55 cubic inches in any normal man or woman, while
in the chimpanzee it is but 274 cubic inches, and in
the orang it is less. This preponderance of brain is
the one great anatomical distinction between him and
the brutes, whom he resembles in every bone and
muscle, nerve and blood-vessel, and from whom the
eighty vestigial structures in his muscular, skeletal, and
other systems—things obviously of no use to him and
only valuable as illustrations in hospital practice—
render it impossible to admit his physical separation.
26 MAMMALS
There are said to be two species of gorilla, one
brownish and blackish, the other having a yellow face
when young ; but only one is at present generally re-
cognised by zoologists, the n’jena of West Equatorial
Africa, from which came the nickname ‘Gena’ given to
the Crystal Palace specimen in which the Rev. J. G.
Wood was so much interested. The gorilla’s limbs
are much longer than those of a man, and he is the
biggest of the man-like group, and the only one ex-
cept man with anything like a calf to his leg. There
was a gorilla in Berlin which died of consumption in
1877, after fifteen months of captivity. On this animal
a good many observations were made, with the result
that he seemed to be of about the same standard of
intelligence as the more familiar chimpanzee. Some
.of his traits were peculiarly childish. On the voyage
home, when he felt a longing for sugar or fruit, which
was kept in the dining saloon, he would slip in there
when he thought no one was looking and go straight
to the cupboard, make a quick and dexterous snatch
at the sugar basin or fruit basket, and close the cup-
board door behind him before beginning to enjoy his
_ plunder, and if he were discovered he would cut and
run with his booty much as a naughty boy might do
with an apple, his whole behaviour making. it clear
that he was conscious of doing wrong. He also took
a special pleasure in making a noise by beating on
hollow things, and never missed an opportunity of
drumming on casks, dishes, or tin trays.
This habit of amusing himself has been de-
scribed by Dr. Garner as characteristic of the gorilla
in his native forests. One he describes as beating
ORANGUTAN O77,
with his hands ‘alternately, and with great rapidity,
and not unlike the manner in which the natives
beat a drum, except that each hand made the
same number of strokes, and the strokes were in a
constant series, rising and falling from very soft
to very loud, and wice versd; and a number of these
runs followed one another during the whole time that
the voicé continued. Between the first and second
strokes the interval was slightly longer than between
the second and third, and so on. As the beating
increased in loudness the intervals shortened in a
corresponding degree, whereas in the diminuendo the
intervals lengthened as the beating softened, and the
author of the sounds seemed conscious of this fact.
I could not, however, trace any relation in time or
harmony between the music and the beating, except
that they usually began at the same time and ended
at the same time ; but the voice suddenly stopped at
the very climax of the sounds, whereas the beating
was stopped at any part of the scale. I have no
doubt that the gorilla sometimes beats his breast, and
he has been seen to do so in captivity ; but I do
not think it follows that he is confined to that.’
There are at least three living species of orang,
all of them found in Sumatra and Borneo, the one
generally known to us being Szmda satyrus. Orang
is the Malay for ‘man, and wtan, which is com-
monly coupled with it, is merely the Malay for ‘ of
the woods. The orang is distinguished from the
gorilla and chimpanzee in being a reddish animal,
and he also has eight bones in his wrist instead of
seven. His arms are long, and his knees turn out-
28 MAMMALS
ward, so that he walks on the outside of his feet,
much as a boy does who treads his boots down. His
forehead is a high one, by no means so retreating as
in the gorillas and chimpanzees, and he has no ridges
to speak of over his eyes. His canine tecth are very
large, and, although he has twelve ribs like man, he
has only sixteen joints in his backbone. A. fossil
orang has been found in Northern India, and a close
ally, the Dryopithecus (which simply means ‘monkey
of the woods’), inhabited Western Europe in Miocene
times.
In Borneo the orang is generally known as the
mias, and under this name has been fully described
by Dr. A. R. Wallace. Dr. Wallace says that ‘he
walks deliberately along some of the larger branches
in the semi-erect attitude which the great length of
his arms and the shortness of his legs cause him
naturally to assume ; and the disproportion between
these limbs is increased by his walking on his
knuckles, not on the palm of the hand, as we should
do. Henever jumps or springs or seems to hurry him-
self, and yet manages to get along almost as quickly
as a person can run through the forest beneath,’
Like the gorilla and chimpanzee, he has the habit
of twisting together the smaller branches, so as to
make a platform on which to rest, and on one occa-
sion a large mias, which had not only been mortally
wounded, but had one of his arms broken by a rifle
bullet, succeeded in a wonderfully short time in con-
structing a platform which, besides concealing him
from sight, was strong enough to sustain the weight
of his heavy body after he was dead.
GIBBONS 29
Orangs have been known in captivity in Europe
for over a hundred years. In 1776 there was one
living in the menagerie of the Prince of Orange. All
the captive specimens have impressed their keepers
by their intelligence. Leuret gives a remarkable in-
stance of this. ‘One of the orangs,’ he says, ‘which
recently died at the menagerie, was accustomed, when
the dinner-hour had come, to open the door of the
room where he took his meals in company with
several persons. As he was not sufficiently tall to
reach as high as the key of the door, he hung on to
a rope, balanced himself, and, after a few oscillations,
very quickly reached the key. His keeper, who was
rather worried by so much exactitude, one day took
occasion to make three knots in the rope, which,
having thus been made too short, no longer permitted
the orang to seize the key. The animal, after an in-
effectual attempt, recognising the nature of the obstacle
which opposed his desire, climbed up the rope, placed
himself above the knots, and untied all three. The
same ape wishing to open a door, his keeper gave
_ him a bunch of fifteen keys; the ape tried them in
turn till he found the one he wanted. Another time
a bar of iron was put into his hands, and he made
use of it as a lever†Cuvier, too, had an orang which
used to drag a chair from one end of a room to the
other, in order to stand upon it so as to reach a latch
he desired to open.
The last genus of the Szmdide is that to which
the gibbons belong. These are the only apes, as
already mentioned, who habitually walk upright, and
keep their balance with their arms in any position,
30 MAMMALS
They inhabit the Malay Peninsula and its neighbour-
hood, and though in some respects very like man in
structure, they are in others rather closely allied to
the baboons. Their generic name, /7ylobates, means
‘tree-traveller,’ and in habits they are essentially
arboreal, living in large companies among the
branches, swinging through wonderful distances, and
indulging in loud and almost musical cries as they
leap along. ‘Among the branches, says the Rev.
J. G. Wood, ‘it would be as easy to catch a swallow
on the wing as the gibbon. The cry of the agile
gibbon is a very remarkable one, consisting of the
chromatic scale very rapidly rendered, and concluded
by a couple of barks, one an octave below the other.
One of these creatures, which was kept tame for
some time, was placed in a large room in which
branches were fixed at some distance from each other,
so as to represent the boughs of a tree. Eighteen
feet was the longest space between the branches,
and through this space she would launch herself,
uttering her chromatic cry, and catching, while in
mid-air, fruit or cake that was thrown to her.†One
of the gibbons at the Calcutta Zoological Gardens,
a hoolock, was in the habit of catching birds on the
wing that flew into his cage. There are several
species of gibbon, the best known being the siamang,
the lar or white-handed gibbon, the hoolock, with
the white frontal band, which is the only species
occurring in India, the agile gibbon, and the silver
gibbon. They have all been kept in confinement,
and many stories are told of their affectionate dis-
position. ‘I keep in my garden,’ says one writer, ‘a
ANECDOTE OF A GIBBON 3t
number of gibbons (Aylobates agilis). They live
quite’ free from all restraint in the trees, merely
coming when called to be fed. One of them, a young
male, on one occasion fell from a tree and dislocated
his wrist ; it received the greatest attention from the
others, especially from an old female, who, however,
was no relation. She used, before eating her own
plantains, to take up the first that were offered to her
every day and give them to the cripple, who was
living in the eaves of a wooden house; and I have
frequently noticed that a cry of fright, pain, or dis-
tress from one would bring all the others at once to
the complainer, and they would then condole with
him and fold him in their arms.’
But this sympathy is quite in accordance with
the character of all the Anthropoddea. In them, as
Romanes observes, ‘affection and sympathy are
strongly marked, the latter, indeed, more so than in
any other animals, not even excepting the dog’ It
is at least significant that the animals whose infancy
is prolonged—that is, with whom the mother’s care
lasts longest—are almost invariably the gentlest and
most intelligent ; for it is quite a mistake to suppose
that apes or monkeys are of inferior intelligence to
dogs, or elephants, or horses. By a confusion of
thought, docility is mistaken for intelligence, and
intelligence measured by the ease with which it can
be adapted to the service of man. The negro’s faith-
fulness as a slave is no testimony to the superiority
of his intellectual powers over those of the Arab or
the European.
Next to the Szmzidz, on the downward track,
32 MAMMALS
come what may be classed as the monkeys properly
so called, comprising the three families of the narrow-
nosed monkeys, confined to the Old World, the
broad-nosed monkeys, confined to America, and the —
marmosets, which are also exclusively American. Of
these three groups there are at least two hundred
species. Few people have a notion of the relative
importance of monkeys in the animal series, or of
their wide distribution in the present and the past.
Although there is now but one monkey in Europe,
Macacus inuus, the pithecus of Aristotle, otherwise
the Barbary macaque, more familiarly known as the
ape of the rock of Gibraltar, fossil remains of
macaques are found scattered all over the Continent,
and have even been unearthed as far north as Grays,
on the northern bank of the Thames. There is a
macaque (MZ. fuscatus) in Japan; and in the coldest
and least accessible forests of Eastern Tibet there is
a stump-tailed macaque (JZ. ¢2betanus) as well as the
Tibetan langur with the tip-tilted nose, which haunts
the forests between Moupin and Lake Khokonor,
where snow is on the ground for the greater portion
of the year. This langur (Semmnopithecus roxellane)
is one of the most historical of monkeys. In that
curious old Chinese book the Shan Hoc King, which
dates from something like 2205 B.c., there is a por-
trait of what is evidently a specimen of S. voxellana,
with the unmistakable turn-up nose that contrasts
so strikingly with the lengthy proboscis of Masalis
larvatus, the equally singular Bornean kahau. Mon-
keys, as a rule, are tropical animals; how they
BABOONS 33
manage to exist through the long, cold winters of the
Asiatic highlands is somewhat of a mystery.
There are monkeys all over America, from the Rio
Grande do Sul in 30° south latitude to Vera Cruz in
Mexico, where the black-handed spider species is
- found at an elevation of 2,000 feet on the slopes of
Orizaba, and of 4,000 feet in Oajaca. Using the
_term in its generally accepted sense, there are mon-
keys right across Asia, from the Hainan gibbon on
the east to the Arabian baboon on the west. This
_ Arabian baboon is better known on the other side
of the Red Sea as the sacred baboon of the old
_Egyptians, although it is now not found in -Egypt,
but further south in Abyssinia and the Soudan.
Sacred as it was, it would seem, at least occasionally,
to have been put to some use. On one of the old
bas-reliefs there is a fruit-bearing sycamore, in the
branches of which are three monkeys, easily recog-
nisable as Arabian baboons from their long snouts,
well-developed tails, and thickly haired shoulders and
necks ; on either side of the tree are two slaves, with
baskets laden with sycamore figs, and these baskets
they are filling with the figs handed down by the
baboons. It thus appears that the ancient Egyptians
had succeeded in training these animals to gather
fruits and hand them to their masters, precisely after
the fashion that the modern Malays are said to have
trained a langur in Sumatra to perform a similar
kind of ‘service, the fruit in the one case being
Sycamore figs and in the other cocoanuts. The
common long-tailed monkeys of the Egyptian sculp-
tures, it may be as well to note, were either guenons or
Cc
34 MAMMALS
mangabeys, probably guenons, which were well known
in Rome and Athens under the name of Cebus, which
now does duty as the generic designation of an
American family.
There are monkeys in many of the Asiatic islands.
In the Nicobars, as well as on the Arakan coast, there
is that remarkable animal the crab-eating macaque,
which has forsaken the usual simian food in favour
of a diet of crabs and insects, and frequents the tidal
creeks and rivers in family parties of half a dozen or
more, swimming and diving as readily asa man. In
Sumatra there are a large number of species; but
then, Sumatra is a haunt of the orang, and the special
home of the siamang, the largest of the long-armed
gibbons, whose morning and evening observances
attracted the attention of Duvaucel. ‘Siamangs,’ he
says, ‘generally assemble in numerous troops, con-
ducted, it is said, by a chief whom the Malays believe
to be invulnerable, probably because he is more agile,
powerful, and difficult to reach than the rest. Thus
united, they salute the rising and setting sun with
the most terrific cries, which may be heard at several
miles’ distance ; and which, when near, deafen when
they don’t frighten. This is the morning call to the
mountain Malays, but to the inhabitants of the towns
it is a most insupportable annoyance,’
In Java lives the wou-wou, or silver gibbon, its
congener the agile gibbon being found as far north
as the Sulu Islands, between the Philippines and
Borneo. In Borneo, monkey life is well represented,
from the orang downwards, and one species, Hose’s
langur, haunts the woods at elevations up to 4,000 feet
AFRICAN BABOONS 35
on the side of the chief mountain, Kina Balu. From
Celebes farther eastward, and from the small island
of Batchian more eastward still, comes the black ape,
which gives the connecting link between the macaques
and true baboons.
The true baboons are exclusively African, with
the exception of the Arabian species on the Red Sea
littoral. On the West Coast are the drill and man-
drill, the papio, and the anubis; on the East Coast,
and extending right across, is the yellow baboon ;
and in the south is the chacma, found in all the
mountain ranges of Cape Colony, living in droves of
thirty or more, even in the country about Simon’s
Bay and in the tract stretching down to Cape Point.
There are monkeys all over Africa, from the Somali-
land nisnas to the Senegambian patas, from the
Barbary macaque to the Cape vervet. Even 3,000
feet up the slopes of Kilima-njaro there is a guereza ;
and a fine fellow he is, with a long silky mantle and
a brush to his tail that would not disgrace a yak.
But that we know all the African species is very
unlikely ; for Africa has been but little worked as far
_ asits simian fauna is concerned. Sportsmen as a rule
care little for such troublesome things as monkeys.
The differences between the monkeys, strictly so
called, and the anthropoid apes are not so very great.
None of the anthropoids has a tail, but although the
monkeys generally have tails, their tails are of dif-
ferent lengths, and some have no tail at all. There
is one characteristic, however, which is worth noting,
and that is that no Old-World monkey hangs on
by his tail as some of the Americans do, There isa
C2
36 MAMMALS
certain difference in the breast-bone marking the
monkeys off from the anthropoids. In the monkeys
it is narrow and flattened from side to side, instead
of being broad and flattened from back to front.
All the monkeys, too, have eight bones in the wrist,
like the orang and the gibbons. Like the anthro-
poids, the Old-World monkeys have thirty-two teeth,
the ‘dental formula’—that is, the arrangement of
the teeth—being the same as in man, whereas the
-Americans have thirty-six teeth. The American
monkeys also differ from the rest in not having an
opposable thumb—a fact of little importance, but
worth remembering owing to the stress that was
once laid on the fact that civilised man had not an
opposable great toc.
The family of Old-World monkeys is known as
Cercopithecid@,which means‘monkeyswith tails’ (which
is not quite the case), and these are divided into
Cercopithecine, which have check-pouches, and the
legs and arms fairly equal, and Sesnopithecine (sacred
monkeys), which have no cheek-pouches, and have
the legs longer than the arms. The type of species
of the latter family is the sacred monkey of India
(Semnopithecus entellus), otherwise known as the
hanuman, which can be distinguished from the rest
of the group by his black feet and hands, his hair
sticking out over his brow like a pent-house, his tail,
like those of his nearest of kin, being longer than
his head and body put together. Hanuman, it may
be remembered, was the fabulous monkey who was
such friends with Vishnu in the expedition to Ceylon
to recover Sita from the giant Ravana, and he it was
LANGURS 37
who, during that war, bridged Palk Strait with the
rocks that his monkey troops threw into the sea. For
ages the hanuman monkeys have been considered
sacred by the Hindus, and allowed to amuse them-
selves at their own sweet will, much to man’s dis-
comfort ; but of late a check has been put to their
thefts and practical jokes, and they are no longer the
nuisances that they were. In the closely allied
Himalayan langur, the feet and hands are not so
black. Another langur is the negro monkey of Java,
which is black all over, except at the root of the tail
and below. The langurs are all Asiatic; in Africa
they are replaced by a somewhat similar genus, the
colobs, who, however, have no thumbs. Just as the
langurs have a black representative, so have the
colobs (Colobus satanas), who lives on the West
Equatorial coast. The handsomest of the colobine
monkeys are the guerezas, who live on the East
Coast.
One of the langurs—the banded-leaf monkey of
Malaysia—unlike the rest, has four tubercles in the
lower wisdom tooth, thereby resembling the next
group, the various species of Cercopithecus, which are
all African. The commonest of these are the greyish-
green South African vervet, with the blackish chin
and black-tipped tail; the olive-green North-East
African grivet, with the white chin and grey root to
the tail; and the West African green monkey, with
the yellowish whiskers. The next genus to Cerco-
pithecus is Cercocebus, comprising the white-eyelid
monkeys, or mangabeys, of which there are four
species, the most striking being C. fuliecnosus, the
38 MAMMALS
prettiest being C. collar¢s, with the white collar. . The
mangabeys all come from West Africa; they are
the most grimaceful of monkeys, and have a curious
habit of turning up their tail as they walk, as if they
were endeavouring to tickle their nose with it.
The macaques are Asiatic. They are heavier in
build than the mangabeys, and have much more pro-
jecting faces, though among them the nose is never
THE WHITE-COLLARED MANGABEY
as far forward as the mouth. Some of them have
long tails, some of them short tails; one of them has
no tail at all, the tail, for sorting purposes, being now
treated as a ‘negligeable quantity.’ They all re-
semble each other in gestures and voice, and appa-
rently have a rudimentary language. According to
Colonel Tickell, anger is generally silent amongst
them, ‘or, at most, expressed by a low hoarse ew, not
ae
ANECDOTE OF A BONNET-MONKEY 39
so gular or guttural as a growl; ennui and a desire
for company by a whining fom; invitation, depre-
cation, entreaty, by a smacking of the lips and a
display of the incisors into a regular broad grin,
accompanied with a subdued grunting chuckle, highly
expressive, but not to be rendered on paper; fear
and alarm by a loud, harsh shriek—&ra or kraouak
—which serves also as a warning to the others, who
may be heedless of danger.’ Unlike the langurs and
gibbons, they have no call.
Among the many macaques, we may mention the
bonnet-monkey (Macacus sinicus), so called from the
patch of blackish hair on the forehead, which is care-
fully parted in the middle. Mr. Wood describes one
of these animals he met with at the seaside, in charge
of the usual organ-man. ‘Apparently of its own
accord, the monkey had taught itself to imitate the
actions of the children who play on the sands, and
seemed to derive the keenest gratification from imi-
tating their proceedings. The owner allowed it to
roam about as much as it liked, and often it was the
centre of an admiring throng of children, who were
treating it as if it were a pet kitten, the owner all the
while contemplating the group with a broad grin on
his good-humoured countenance. I was first attracted
to the children by their shricks of laughter, which
were occasioned by the business-like way in which the
bonnet-monkey was washing a handkerchief in a little
pail of sea-water. In spite of the preternatural gravity
with which the monkey went through the operations
of washing, shaking, and hanging out to dry, it was
evident that the animal enjoyed the game as much as
40 MAMMALS
the children, and was always ready to wash any
handkerchief that was given him. I rather thought
that, monkey-like, he would have bitten or torn the
handkerchiefs ; but he never injured one of them,
treating them with as much respectful care as if he
were employed by a Chinese laundryman, who is a
model of self-contained gravity when engaged in
getting up linen,’
Closely allied to this species is the Singalese
rilawa, AZ. pileatus, which the Tamil conjurors teach
to dance, and carry from village to village clad in a
grotesque dress to amuse the people, in just the same
way as its relative amuses our children; but, as Mr.
Lydekker says, ‘the mimicry and amusing tricks of a
monkey in captivity are a mere shadow of what they
are in its native condition, so that persons who have
only seen these animals in confinement have but a
faint idea of their true nature. Another common
macaque is the rhesus, or bandar, carried about by the
jugglers in Northern India. The tailless macaque is
the Gibraltar ape, which crossed into Europe before
the straits were formed, and is also found in Morocco
and Algiers, being the only member of the genus
that is not Asiatic.
The series of intermediate forms leading through
the guenons, mangabeys and macaques to the baboons
is now practically complete. The baboons are an
ugly lot, easily distinguishable by their dog-like
heads, which have given them their generic name of
Cynocephalus (dog-headed). They are the biggest of
the monkeys, and have exceptionally big heads. One
of the best looking is the South African chacma,
THE CHACMA AI
otherwise the pig-like one, C: porcarius. The chacma
is not a foe to be despised. According to Mrs.
Martin, no vegetable poison has the slightest effect on
his iron constitution ; and, indeed, if there exists any
poison at all capable of killing him, it is quite certain
that, with his superior intelligence, he would be far
too artful to take it; and where the fiat for his de-
struction has gone forth, a well-organised attack has
to be made on him with dogs and guns. He can
show fight, too, and the dogs must be well trained
and have the safety of numbers to enable them to
face him ; for in fighting he has the immense advan-
tage of hands, with which he seizes a dog and holds
him fast while he inflicts a fatal bite through his
loins. Indeed, for either dog or man to come to close
quarters with Adonis (as the chacma is ironically
called by. the Boers) is no trifling matter. ‘One of
our friends, travelling on horseback, came upon a
number of baboons sitting in solemn parliament on
some rocks. He cantered towards them, anticipating
seeing the ungainly beasts take to their heels in
grotesque panic; but was somewhat taken aback on
finding that, far from being intimidated by his ap-
proach, they refused to move, and sat waiting for
him, regarding him the while with ominous calmness.
The canter subsided into a trot, and the trot into a
sedate walk, and still they sat there ; and so defiant
was the expression on each ugly face that at last the
intruder thought it wisest to turn back and ride igno-
miniously away.’
But the baboons have another side to their nature.
Not long ago there was at the Iondon Zoological
42 MAMMALS
Gardens, according to Dr. Romanes, an Arabian
baboon, C. kamadryas, and an Anubis baboon, C. -
anubts, confined in one cage, adjoining that which
contained another baboon. The Anubis baboon
passed its hand through the wires of the partition
in order to purloin a nut which the large baboon had
left within reach. The Anubis baboon very well
knew the danger he ran, for he waited until his bulky
neighbour had turned his back upon the nut with the
appearance of having forgotten all about it, and, of
course, pounced on the Anubis when temptation
proved too strong for caution, and bit him severely.
‘The Anubis baboon then retired to the middle of
the cage, moaning piteously, and holding his injured
hand against his chest while he rubbed it with the
other one. The Arabian baboon now approached him
from the top of the cage, and, while making a sooth-
ing sound very expressive of sympathy, folded the
sufferer in its arms—exactly as a mother would her
child under similar circumstances. It must be stated
also that this expression of sympathy had a decidedly
quieting effect upon the sufferer, his moans becoming
less piteous as soon as he was enfolded in the arms
of his comforter; and the manner in which he laid
his cheek upon the bosom of his friend was as expres-
sive as anything could be of sympathy appreciated.’
In the Cedide, the chief group of the American
monkeys, the nose is flat and has a broad inter-narial
septum, while the thumb, though not opposable, is
divergent from the fingers, except in the spider-
monkeys, in which it is rudimentary. All the
American monkeys live in the forests, ‘In this
THE WOOLLY SPIDERS 43
purely arboreal life, says Mr. Lydekker, ‘it will
easily be seen that the prehensile tail of those species
which possess such an organ must be of great assist-
ance to their owners in travelling from bough to
bough, and thus from tree to tree. Considering, how-
ever, that the species, like the titis, in which the tail
is not prehensile, are equally as arboreal in habits
as those with prehensile tails, it is quite clear that
the latter organ can only be regarded as a kind
of luxury. Indeed, the whole question as to the
reason why some monkeys have long tails, others
short tails, and others, again, no tails at all, is in-
volved in great obscurity.’
There are ten genera of the Cebide—the capu-
chins, Cebus (Cebus is.merely a derivative of the
Greek ebos, meaning a monkey); the - woolly
monkeys, Lagothrix; the woolly spider-monkeys,
Eriodes ; the spider-monkeys, A¢e/es ; the owl-faced
monkeys, Vyctipithecus ; the squirrel-monkeys, Chry-
Sothrix; the titis, Callthrix; the sakis, Pzthecza ;
the uakaris, Uacaria;,and the howlers. The capu-
chins have thickish tails, with no bare patch at the
end of the tail, where it is used for clinging to the
trees ; in fact, if the tail be looked upon as a third
hand, it is in this genus a hand without a palm. In
the woolly monkeys this patch is present, and con-
spicuous owing to the thickness of the fur everywhere
else. The woolly spiders connect them with the
spiders properly so-called. They are of much lighter
build, and have long, narrow tails and rudimentary
thumbs. The spiders live almost all their time in
the trees, but now and then they come to the ground
A4 MAMMALS
for a run, standing on their hind legs, holding their
arms up in the air, and bending their tails up into a
double curve. The owl-faced monkeys, or dourou-
colis, have very long tails, but the tails are not pre-
hensile ; neither are those of the squirrels, or saimaris,
and the titis, which are often classed together.
These monkeys are much smaller as a rule than any
of the preceding, and they vary very much in the
length of their tails. The sakis also do not have
prehensile tails; the uakaris have hardly any tail at
all, but the howlers have very long tails and these
are prehensile. On the tail alone they would be
classed next to the spiders ; but the expansion of the
hyoid bone, which particularly distinguishes them, is
so clearly foreshadowed among the titis and sakis
that these genera have to be placed between. This
bone, which joins on to the upper part of the wind-
pipe, is a most extraordinary-looking thing ; there are
some good specimens of it in the Kensington Natural
History Museum—bony bags as thin as paper and as
large as an ordinary wine-glass, a mouth-organ of
great capacity for the production of the exasperating
music which has given the genus the name of MMycetes,
or moaners.
The best known of the capuchins is perhaps the
brown one (C. fatuellus),a representative of which
was experimented on by Dr. Romanes, who published
the diary of the proceedings in his Amdmal Intelli-
gence. We must find room for an extract from this
most interesting record. ‘To-day he obtained posses-
sion of a hearth-brush, one of the kind which has the
handle screwed into the brush. He soon found the
THE RED-FACED SPIDER MONKEY
46 MAMMALS
way to unscrew the handle, and having done that, he
immediately began to try to find out the way to
screw it in again. This he in time accomplished.
At first he put the wrong end of the handle into the
hole, but turned it round and round the right way for
screwing. Finding it did not hold, he turned the
other end of the handle and carefully stuck it into
the hole, and began again to turn it the right way.
It was of course a very difficult feat for him to per-
form, for he required both his hands to hold the
handle in the proper position, and to turn it between
his hands in order to screw it in, and the long bristles
of the brush prevented it from remaining steady or
with the right side up. He held the brush with his
hind hand, but even then it was very difficult for him
to get the first screw to fit into the thread. He
worked at it, however, with the most unwearying per-
severance until he got the first turn of the screw to
catch, and he then quickly turned it round and round
until it was screwed up to the end. The most re-
markable thing was that, however often he was dis-
appointed in the beginning, he never was induced to
try turning the handle the wrong way; he always
screwed it from right to left. As soon as he had
accomplished his wish he unscrewed it again, and
then screwed it in again, —and amused himself till he
was tired. ‘The desire to accomplish a chosen task,’
continues the diarist, ‘seems a sufficient inducement
to lead him to take any amount of trouble. This
seems a very human feeling, such as is not shown, I
believe, by any othet animal. It is not the desire of
praise, as he never notices people looking on; it is
MARMOSETS 47
simply the desire to achieve an object for the sake of
achieving an object, and he never rests nor allows his
attention to be distracted until it is done. This
monkey also found out how to open boxes with keys,
and did other noteworthy things. His rapidity of
discernment was very striking. When he went back
to the Zoological Gardens he always instantly re-
cognised the friends among whom he had spent his
holiday. ‘I purposely, says the doctor, ‘visited the
monkey-house on Easter Monday, in order to see
whether he would pick me out of the solid mass of
people who fill the place on that day. Although I
could only obtain a place three or four rows back
from the cage, and although I made no sound where-
with to attract his attention, he saw me almost im-
mediately, and with a sudden intelligent look of
recognition ran across the cage to greet me. When
I went away he followed me, as he always did,
to the extreme end of his cage, and stood there
watching my departure as long as I remained in
sight,’
The last and the smallest of the man-like animals
are the Hapalide or marmosets. Unlike the other
American monkeys, these have the same number of
teeth as man, although the arrangement is different,
there being three premolars and two molars, instead
of two premolars and three molars. Like all the rest
of the order, they have two incisors and one canine.
Of course we have taken it as generally known that
the dental formula of man is 2, 1, 2, 3, the first three
figures, the important ones, being easily rememberable
as giving the boiling-point of water. The tail of the
48 MAMMALS
marmosets is long, hairy, and non-prehensile; the
thumb is long but not opposable, and the great toe
is rudimentary, all the fingers and toes being furnished
with pointed claws instead of the flat nails possessed
by all other monkeys. Another noteworthy point is
that the marmosets usually have three young ones at
a birth, while the rest of the monkeys have but one ;
but amongst them, as among all the others, a
youngster that loses its parents is always adopted
and brought up by some other family. There are
two genera of marmosets, those with short canine
teeth being assigned to Hapale, while those in which
the canines are longer than the incisors are assigned
to Midas. It is to Midas that those pretty creatures
the silky marmosets belong.
LEMUROIDEA.—Our next group is mainly
represented in Madagascar, though its distribution
extends between the tropics all the way from the
Philippines and Celebes to the West Coast of Africa.
In its living representatives it is so closely allied to
the monkeys that it is occasionally classed with them ;
in one form it is allied to the rodents, while in its
fossil forms it has obvious affinities not only with the
insectivores but with the ungulates. In Madagascar
it comprises quite half the mammalian fauna. All
of its representatives are arboreal, many of them are
nocturnal, and from their nocturnal habits they have
received the name of Lemuroids, demur being the
Latin for ‘ghost’ or ‘hobgoblin,’
The largest of the group is the indri, found on
the cast side of Madagascar. The sifakas belong to
MARMOSETS
50 MAMMALS
another genus (Propithecus) and are all curiously local
and limited, each distinct species being characteristic
of a distinct area. The avahis or woolly lemurs,
unlike the indris and sifakas, are found either
THE BROWN MOUSE-LEMUR
solitary or in pairs. The true lemurs have more
teeth than the others; the gentle lemur belongs to
a different genus (Hapalemur) distinguishable by the
more rounded head and shorter muzzle; the weasel-
LEMURS 51
lemurs have either no upper front incisors at all or
only rudimentary ones; the mouse-lemurs are
hardly larger than rats, and are remarkable for re-
maining dormant during the hottest period of the
year. The brown mouse-lemur (of which we give
the portrait) was brought to England by Mr. Shaw,
the well-known missionary. The dwarf mouse-lemur
is the animal Buffon described as the rat of Mada-
gascar ; it builds nests of twigs as if it were a rook,
and lines them with hair. The galagos are found
on the African mainland; the large size of their
ears sufficiently distinguishes them ; they are found
practically all over Africa, and have been known for
the last hundred years. The two genera Wycticebus
and Lords are Asiatic; Perodicticus, which includes
the potto and awantibo, is exclusively African. In
earlier times the group hada much wider distribution,
fossil representatives having been found not only in
England and France but in North America. There
are two other families of the lemuroids besides the
Lemuride. These are the Zarsizde and the Chiro-
myid@, each represented by a single genus and a
single species.
The Tarsier derives its name from the frog-like
elongation of its ankle bones. In his Crudse of the
Marchesa, Dr. Guillemard says of one obtained at
Celebes :—‘ The most interesting addition to our mena-
gerie was a tiny lemuroid animal, brought to us by a
native, by whom it was said to have been caught upon
the mainland. These little creatures, which are of
arboreal and nocturnal habits, are about the size of a
small rat, and are covered with a remarkably thick fur,
D2
eo MAMMALS
which is very soft. The tail is long, and covered with
hair at the root and tip, while the middle portion of it is
nearly bare. The eyes are enormous, and, indeed, seem,
together with the equally large ears, to constitute the
greater part of the face, for the jaw and nose are very
small, and the latter is set in, like that of a pug dog,
almost at a right angle. The hind-limb at once
attracts attention from the great length of the tarsal
bones, and the hand is equally noticeable for its
length, the curious claws with which it is provided,
and the extraordinary disc-shaped palps on the
palmar surface of the fingers, which probably enable
the animal to retain its hold in almost any position. °
This weird-looking creature we were unable to keep
long in captivity, for we could not get it to eat the
cockroaches which were almost the only food with
which we could supply it. It remained still by day
in its darkened cage, but at night, especially if dis-
turbed, it would spring vertically upwards in an odd
mechanical manner, not unlike the hopping of a
flea. On the third day it found a grave in a pickle-
bottle.’
The aye-aye is quite as curious, with its rodent-
like incisors, its absence of tusks, and its attenuated
middle claw, with which it extracts from their
burrows the larve which are its natural food. In
appearance it is not unlike a cat with a large bushy
tail and rounded ears. ‘It is no wonder, says Mr.
Shaw, ‘that in connection with so curious an animal
a number of superstitious beliefs should be current
among the Betsimisaraka, in whose country the aye-
aye is principally found. In reference to its name,
THE AYE-AYE 53
one account says that the first discoverers took it
from one part of the island to another, the inhabi-
tants of which had never seen it, and in their surprise
they exclaimed “Hay! Hay!†Another tale is that,
many years ago, some Betsimisaraka had occasion to
open an old tomb, in which had been buried one of
their ancestors. No sooner was the tomb opened
than this animal, into which the said ancestor had
developed, sprang out, and hence the exclamation of
surprise that has attached itself as a name to this
creature. Many of the Betsimisaraka still believe
that the aye-aye is the embodiment of their fore-
fathers, and hence will not touch it, much less do it
any injury. It is said that, when one is discovered
dead in the forest, these people make a tomb for
it and bury it with all the formality of a funeral.
The superstition extends even to the nest which the
animal makes for itself If a man receives from
another, or picks up accidentally, the portion on
which the head of the aye-aye has rested, it is sure
to bring good fortune ; while the receiving of that
part on which its feet rested is followed by bad luck
or death. This has passed into a proverb among the
Betsimisaraka.’
In connection with this local ancestral theory, it
is a strange coincidence that naturalists are all agreed
in looking upon the aye-aye as the very last animal
that can be classified as man-like. It is the last of
the lemuroids, which some with good reason group
in one order with the anthropoids under the designa-
tion of Primates.
54 MAMMALS
CHIROPTERA.—In the zoological series the
next order is that of the bats, or Chzroptera, the
hand-winged mammals, the only mammals that have
the power of true flight. The hands and arms are
large in proportion to the rest of the frame, and very
light in structure, the bones being remarkably hollow
and long and slender. Were those of a man to be in
the same proportion, his fathom—that is, the distance
he can stretch from finger-tip to finger-tip—would
measure thirty feet instead of six. The wing is an
expansion of the skin, stretching generally from the
shoulder along the arms and fingers, and so down to
the hind legs or the tail. The thumb is always free,
and carries the claw by which the bat climbs ; the
toes are always free, and are all clawed. The most
peculiar thing in the skeleton is the knee-joint, which
is turned backwards like the. elbow, so that a bat
cannot walk readily, and rarely settles on the ground.
Another point worth notice is the weakness of the
hip-girdle compared with that of the shoulders, whose
strength bears eloquent witness to the immense power
necessary for sustained flight. No mammal has so
highly developed a skin as a bat ; it is so richly pro-
vided with nerve filaments that the sense of touch
must be many times greater than that of any other
vertebrate. As a matter of fact, a bat deprived
of sight and smell and hearing has been found
capable of flying easily about a room without knock-
ing against a maze of silken threads, which had been
stretched across it so as to leave spaces only just
large enough for his open wings to pass. This power
of discovering the proximity of objects without sce-
SKELETON OF BAT
66 MAMMALS
ing them, hearing them, or touching them, as we
understand the meaning of touch, seems to be chiefly
concentrated in the wing membranes, in the ears, and
in the so-called ‘leaf’ that looks like a mask on the
face, and serves the same purpose as a cat’s whiskers.
Bats are not blind; on the contrary, their eyes are
remarkably bright and intelligent.
The naturalist, rather curiously, divides his bats
into large ones and small ones, the large ones being
all fruit-eaters and all natives of the eastern hemi-
sphere. These can be readily distinguished from the
others owing to their having always three joints in
the second finger, and generally a claw on that finger
as well as the claw on the thumb. The other bats
never have the extra claw, and have either one or
two joints in the finger. Another distinction is that
the molar teeth of the fruit-bats have smooth crowns,
with a longitudinal groove, while the molars of the
others have cusped crowns and cross grooves. It is
also stated that, when a fruit-bat goes to sleep, he
hangs himself up by one leg, while all the other bats
hang themselves up by two; but as there are four
hundred and fifty species of bats altogether, it is
probable that this is a rule not without exceptions.
Fruit-bats, or fox-bats, as they are sometimes
called, are found in enormous numbers in India,
Australia, and the Polynesian Islands, some of the
species feeding quite as much on flowers as on fruit.
Many of them migrate, as birds do, and return to the
same spots year after year, as their food becomes fit
for them. All these bats, which are also known as
flying foxes, have no tails, and belong to the genus
THE COLLARED FRUIT-BAT AND YOUNG
58 MAMMALS
Pteropus. The fox-bats, with short tails and short
fur on the back of the neck, are assigned to another
genus, Xantharpyza. In the accompanying illustra-
tion we have a representative of YY. collaris, the
collared fox-bat, which is interesting as showing the
way in which such animals carry their young. There
are collared bats living in the great pyramid of
Cheops, others in the old buildings of Palestine, and
one species has its home in the rocksalt caves of
Kishm Island in the Persian Gulf.
The general colouration of the fruit-bats is black
and tan. Some of them are anything but prepos-
sessing in appearance. For instance, there is a
‘hammer-headed’ bat in the Gaboon country which
has a head like an ugly old horse, and there is a
genus of ‘tube-nosed bats’ in the neighbourhood of
Torres Straits the species of which look like Japanese
monsters made up for show purposes. On the other
hand, some are really handsome. In the Solomon
Totunds there is one, a long-tongued fruit-bat, Veso-
nycterts Woodford:, which has a bright orange body
and dark brown wings. Another interesting bat in the
Solomon Islands is the cusped-toothed one, in which
the teeth have cusps that almost obliterate the longi-
tudinal grooves, thus giving the transition form
between the two sub-orders which zoologists have
set up.
The insectivorous bats are much more numerous
than the others, there being no less than five families
of them. Among those most worthy of notice are
the horse-shoes with nose-leaves and no inner ear or
tragus, as it is called, but a membrane in front, which
BATS 59
is known as the anti-tragus. Two of these bats—the
large one, Rhinolophus ferrum-equinum, and the lesser
one, R. hipposiderus—are found in Britain. Another
family, the Mycteride, have large ears, a large tragus,
and a small nose leaf; to this family belongs the false
vampire of India, Megaderma lyra, and the Queens-
land form, MZ. gigas, which it is as difficult to look
upon as a ‘small’ bat as it is to consider Carponycteris
minimus asa ‘large’ one. The genus Wycteris, which
gives its name to the family,
is mainly an African one.
The next family, Vesper-
tiliontde, includes all the
British species except the
two horse-shoes. They all
have a tragus, but no nose-
leaf, and they all have
a longish tail, to the tip
of which the membrane
stretches. The long-ear,
Plecotus aurttus, may be
taken as the representative of its genus. It may be
recognised by its long ears and the grooves on the
muzzle behind the nostrils. The ears are as mobile
as those of a dog, and are not only moved backwards
and forwards, but thrown into graceful folds during
the act of listening, these folds being formed by three
slight gristly rays that run from the base of the ear
to the edge. This bat, which has a wing-spread of
about ten inches, is found as far west as Ireland and
as far east as the Himalaya, and all through Europe
and North Africa, Like the other British species, it
HEAD OF LONG-EARED BAT
LONG-EARED BATS
THE LONG-EARED BAT 61
hibernates—that is to say, enters into a state of torpor
through the winter, when there are no insects to eat,
suspending its respiration and digestion, and slowing
LONG-EARED BAT SLEEPING
its pulsation until its heart beats but once a second
instead of at the normal furious rate.
The long-ear does not come out until very late in
the evening ; the barbastelle, Syzotus barbastellus,is a
much earlier riser. This is a blacker bat than the other,
62 MAMMALS
though white and piebald specimens are on record,
and it has its muzzle apparently cut off short, with
a groove on each side leading up to the nostrils.
It is somewhat clumsy looking, and in its flight seems
to take matters much more easily than that commonest
of British bats, the pipistrelle, Vesperugo pzpistrellus,
BARBASTELLE BAT WALKING
which is out every evening from March to December,
swift and busy, with long curving swoops and rapid
twists and turns, as if it had not a minute to lose. A
larger bat, and a more powerful one, is the noctule,
belonging to the same genus ; he is the great beetle-
catcher, ‘essentially adapted,’ says Bell, ‘for the cap-
VAMPIRE BAT 63
ture and mastication of coleopterous insects, and he
flies high and straight, with a’dash at every luckless
cockchafer that may come sailing near him.
Another important family of bats is the Em-
ballonuride, of which there is only one European spe-
cies) Among the more remarkable members of this
group are the white bats, belonging to the genus Dz-
HEAD OF VAMPIRE BAT
clidurus, found in Central and South America; the
naked bat of Malaysia, which has a pouch for holding
the young while they are suckling ; the New Zealand
bat, which not only catches insects as it flies, but as it
creeps among the trees; and the vampires of South
America, of which the only blood-suckers are Desmo-
dus rufus and Diphylla ecaudata, In the Kensington
64 MAMMALS
Natural History Museum there is a specimen of Des-
modus, which Darwin saw caught in the act of sucking
blood from a horse. Regarding its capture he says:
«The vampire bat is often the cause of much trouble
by biting the horses on their withers. The injury is
generally not so much owing to the loss of blood as
to the inflammation which the pressure of the saddle
afterwards produces. The whole circumstance has
lately been doubted in England; I was, therefore,
fortunate in being present when one was actually
caught on a horse’s back. We were bivouacking late
one evening near Coquimbo, in Chili, when my ser-
vant, noticing that one of the horses was very restive,
went to see what was the matter, and fancying he
could distinguish something, suddenly put his hand
on the beast’s withers, and secured the vampire. In
the morning the spot where the bite had been inflicted
was easily distinguished from being slightly swollen
and bloody.’
INSECTIVORA.—The bats are a special order
of greatly modified insectivores, one of the transition
stages being, perhaps, suggested in the Malaysian
cobegos, who have not the power of true flight, but,
like the flying squirrels and flying lizards, have an
extension of membrane, which enables them to take
exceedingly long leaps from tree to tree. Their
genus is Galeopithecus, and there are two species.
The insectivores are a very miscellaneous order.
Though similar in structure, they differ very much in
their food. Instead of living entirely on insects, as
one would suppose from their name, some of them eat
WATER SHREWS
66 MAMMALS
leaves as well; some of them, like the mole, eat
worms ; one of them, the potamogale, feeds on fish,
and, unlike the rest of the order, has no collar-bones.
Most of them have soft fur; but one genus, that
containing the hedge-hogs, has a spiny coat, and
another (Cenéetes), which includes the Madagascar
ground-hog, is more or less spiny. There are some two
hundred species altogether, the most numerous being
the various kinds of shrews. Among these are the
tree-shrews ( 7upazide@), that are like squirrels, both in
habit and appearance ; the jumping shrews (Macro-
scelide), long-nosed and long-legged, which hop about
like tiny kangaroos ; the true shrews (Sordcide), which
are often mistaken for mice, but differ markedly from
them in their sickle-shaped incisor teeth. There are
many kinds of shrews —earless shrews, water shrews,
musk shrews, burrowing shrews, swimming shrews,
web-footed shrews, and mole shrews, which last,
however, belong to a different family, the Zalpidz,
which includes the desmans and the moles. The
mole extends from England to Japan, and fossil
moles have been found in the rocks all the way down
to the Lower Miocene. The mole has rudimentary
eyes, but no external ears; its fur is like velvet, set
vertically on the skin, so that it can pass backwards
or forwards along its burrow with equal ease. Its
shoulder-girdle is even more powerful than that of
the bats, and the humerus bears a number of ridges
for the attachment of the muscles that make it easily
distinguishable from that of any other mammal. It
has been said that the mole is as happy as a skylark,
Assuredly his frame is as marvellously adapted for
CARNIVORA 67
the conditions of his existence and the work he has
to do.
CARNIVORA.—The order of carnivores is
another old group which must not have its name
taken too literally. It does not include all the flesh-
eaters ; and some of its members, notably among the
bears, are practically vegetarians. Speaking gene-
rally, however, the name is appropriate, for most of
the species prey on other animals and live on warm
flesh. In structure there is a great resemblance
among them all. Their lower jaw can only move
vertically, owing to the projecting process or condyle
being semi-cylindrical, and working in a deep
narrow, glenoid ‘ fossa’—or hollow—of corresponding
form. Like the potamogale, but unlike the rest of the
insectivores, their collar-bones are either absent or
represented by little splints embedded in the
muscles. Unlike, too, the majority of the insecti-
vores, the bones of the forearm are distinct, and
the fibula in the lower leg slender, though it is
always separated from the tibia. The wrist-bones,
too, are peculiar in having the lunar and scaphoid
all in one, and no central bone; and with regard to
this, it may be as well to explain that in the typical
wrist there are eight bones—(1) the scaphoid, so called
from its boat-shaped socket ; (2) the lunar, so called
from its crescent shape, both of these being in con-
nection with the radius ; (3) the cuneiform, or wedge-
shaped bone, connected by a ligament with the ulna;
and (4) the pisiform, or pea-shaped bone, developed in
the tendon and gliding over in front of the cunei-
E2
68 MAMMALS
form; next to the fingers come (5) the trapezium,
(6) the trapezoid, (7) the magnum, and (8) the
unciform, or hook-shaped bone, the ninth, or central
bone, to which we have more than once alluded,
coming between the first and second rows.
The carnivores are divided into three groups—
fissipeds, pinnipeds, and creodonts—the first being
mostly land animals, of about 300 species ; the
second water animals, of about 50 species ; and the
third being as yet only found fossil. The fissipeds
are at once distinguishable from the others by their
having flesh-teeth, or carnassials—that is to say, a
back tooth on each side of both jaws specially modi-
fied to suit their carnivorous diet. There are three
groups of these land carnivores, which we may call
the cats, the dogs, and the bears, or, to use the tech-
nical and less misleading terms, the 4/urozdea, the
Cynoidea, and the Arctotdea. To the first of these
belong all the Fedde, large and small, lions, tigers,
leopards, pumas, lynxes, and what not; the Vzver-
vide, or civets, and mongooses ; the Proteleida, with
one representative, the aard-wolf; and the Hyenide.
The Cynoidea are really the dog family (Canzde),
including the wolves and foxes. The Arctotdea
include the Uvrstde, or bears; the Procyonide@, or
raccoons; and the Mustelide, or otters, badgers and
weasels.
None of the carnivores have less than four toes
on each foot. The dogs have five toes in front and
four behind; but on the fore feet the thumb is so
short as not to reach the ground, and on the hind
foot there is occasionally a ‘dew-claw,’ which is
SKELETON OF A LION
70 MAMMALS
merely the rudimentary great toe. The bears have
five toes on each foot. The cats have their toes
padded and clawed, the claws being what is known
as ‘retractile’—that is, held back by an elastic liga-
ment in such a way as to be kept off the ground in
the act of walking, or at will, and at the same time
being instantly protrusible by stretching the fingers,
or toes, as the case may be. None of the dogs have
retractile claws, nor are any of their claws very
sharp. When an animal walks on its toes it is said
to be ‘digitigrade,; when on its sole it is ‘ planti-
grade.’ The cats and dogs are usually classed as
digitigrade, the bears as plantigrade and sub-planti-
grade; but it is as well not to insist on this too
closely. The typical cat has thirty teeth, the formula
being 3, I, 3, 1 for the top jaw, and 3,1,2,1 for the other ;
the typical dog, like the typical bear, has forty-two
teeth, the dental formula being 3, I, 4, 2 for the top
jaw, and 3, 1, 4,3 for the other. But some cats have
only twenty-eight teeth, and one of the dogs
(Lalande’s) has forty-eight, being no less than four
molars in each half-jaw, a dentition which no other
mammal has that is not a marsupial.
In any notice of the Fede it is customary to
begin with the lion. He certainly looks more like a
‘king of the beasts’ than the tiger, and, as a rule,
holds himself more royally. His mane has a good
deal to do with this, perhaps, but in the wild state he
does not grow to the same extent as when he is in
captivity, and altogether he is much more wiry in
build than artists have figured him. He is now only
found in Asia and Africa, slowly decreasing in num-
LIONS
V2 MAMMALS
bers under the persistent attacks of the hunter and the
gradual spread of cultivation. Forty years ago lions
were so numerous: in the Delhi district that one
sportsman, Colonel Acland Smith, killed fifty of
them ; nowadays they are becoming so rare that in
Kattywar they are being preserved as if they were
partridges. Between the Tigris and the Euphrates
they are still fairly plentiful, and they used to range
into Palestine and Asia Minor, and even, according
to Herodotus, into Thrace and Macedonia, while a
species, Felzs spele@a, so closely allied to / deo as to
be almost indistinguishable from it, roamed in Pre-
Glacial days all over Western Europe, and even into
what is now Britain.
Lions are to be met with all over Africa, but few
are now killed south of the Orange River. In
Mashonaland they still abound. Lord Randolph
Churchill on one occasion saw seven of them at once,
‘trooping and trotting along ahead of us like a lot of
enormous dogs—great yellow objects, offering such a
sight as I had never dreamed of. In Damaraland
Galton ‘at one place put up eight lions; they were
not close together, but within a space about two
hundred yards across, through which we happened to -
drive. It was the largest pack I had seen. Fourteen
is the largest I have ever heard of.’
Lions are not nearly so dangerous to man as is gene-
rally supposed. The last-mentioned explorer remarks
that, at a rendezvous with the natives, he was curious
to know what animals were most fatal to man in that
country. ‘We counted over all the deaths that we
could think of. Buffaloes (though not common here)
AN ADVENTURE WITH LIONS ; 73
killed the most, then rhinoceroses, and, lastly, lions.
Areep, the predecessor of Cornelius as chief of his
tribe, was killed by a black rhinoceros. It is curious
how many people are wounded by lions, though not
killed. A very active Damara, who was some time
with me in Damaraland, but who stayed behind as I
journeyed up country, was in a dreadfully mangled
state when I returned. He had found a lion in the
act of striking down his ox, and rushed at him with
his assegai ; he gave him a wound that must have
proved mortal, for the assegai went far into his side,
but the lion turned upon him, and seizing him, bit
one elbow-joint quite through, and continued worry-
ing him until some other Damaras ran up and killed
the animal. My servant, Hans, had a very narrow
escape some time since. He was riding old Friesch-
land (the most useful ox I had, but now worn out by
the Ondonga journey) along the Swakop, when he
saw something dusky by the side of a camelthorn
tree, two hundred yards off. This was a lion, that
rose and walked towards him. Hans had his gun
in his gun-bag by the side of his saddle, and rode on,
for there is no use in provoking hostilities single-
handed with a lion, unless some object has to be
gained by it. As every sportsman at last acknow-
ledges, the coolest hand and the best shot are never
safe, for a bullet, however well aimed, is not certain to
put the animal hors de combat. After the lion had
walked some twenty or thirty-yards, Frieschland, the
ox, either saw or smelt him, and became furious.
Hans had enough to do to keep his seat, for a power-
ful long-horned ox tossing his head about and plung-
74 MAMMALS
ing wildly is a most awkward back for the best of
jockeys. The lion galloped up. He and Hans were
side by side. The lion made his spring, and one heavy
paw came on the nape of the ox’s neck, and rolled
him over ; the other clutched at Hans’s arm, and tore
the sleeve of his shirt to ribbons, but did not wound
him, and there they all three lay. Hans, though he
was thrown upon his gun, contrived to wriggle it out,
the lion snarling and clutching at him all the time;
but for all that, he put both bullets into the beast’s
body, who dropped, then turned round, and limped
bleeding away into. the recesses of a broad, thick
cover ; and, of course, Hans, shaken as he was, let him
go. There were no dogs to follow him, so he was
allowed to die in peace, and subsequently his spoor
was taken up, and his remains found.’
Lions loom large when seen by the excited ex-
plorer in the dusk of the evening, but they dwindle
considerably when alongside the measuring tape. Mr.
Selous gives ten feet as the length of his largest
African lion, and from this we must deduct nearly
a yard for the tail. Indian specimens recently
measured are rather smaller, so that we shall not be
far wrong in taking the lion as under four feet in
height and about six feet in length, exclusive of his
tail—that wonderful tail which has at its tip the tuft
that surrounds the horny nail, known in fact and
fiction as the thorn with which the king of beasts
goads himself to anger.
The lioness is about a foot shorter than the male
over all—at the longest nine feet—and stands propor-
tionally lower. She has no mane, and when very
LIONESS AND CUBS
76 MAMMALS
young is marked with stripes and spots, just as the
males are, but more conspicuously. From their
general sandy colour it is obvious that lions are not
dwellers in forest districts, but in open sandy plains.
As a rule, they sleep during the day and prowl at
night, when their deep bass roar dominates every
other sound. A lion, however, has three roars—one
a sort of challenge; another, in quite a different key,
betraying his regret at being baulked of his prey ;
and a third a menagerie roar, which is by no means
alarming.
Sir Samuel Baker’s description of the challeng-
ing roar is perhaps the best: ‘There is nothing
so beautiful or enjoyable to my ears as the roar
of a lion on a still night, when everything is calm,
and no sound disturbs the solitude except the
awe-inspiring notes, like the rumble of distant
thunder, as they die away into the deepest bass.
The first few notes resemble the bellow of a bull ;
these are repeated in slow succession four or five
times, after which the voice is sunk into a lower key,
and a number of quick, short roars are at length
followed by rapid coughing notes, so deep and power-
ful that they seem to vibrate through the earth.’
The tiger (F. ¢igris) differs from the lion in the
absence of the mane and in the general colouration.
Tigers are boldly striped, as a rule, but white tigers,
and even black tigers, are on record; and the Chinese
tiger, instead of having a short velvety coat, is almost
as furry asa bear. The tiger is a splendid cat, quite
as long as the lion, though not so high on the legs ;
and he is the only cat with black cross stripes on his
‘THE TIGER 77
body, a pattern which makes him almost invisible
among the reeds of the jungle and in the shadows of
the forest.
The ground colour of this coat varies con-
siderably ; it is brightest when young. Among the
males it begins to fade as soon as the ruff grows
thick round the throat—the ruff which represents the
lion’s mane. It is yellowest in the Indian jungles ;
it is reddest in the forests of the north. For the tiger
still lives north of Lake Baikal, and in Amurland
and Saghalien ; westward, his present limit seems to
be the Caucasus; eastward, he is at home in Sumatra,
Java, and Bali, though he does not appear to reach
Borneo, nor does he cross Palk Strait from India
into Ceylon.
Fossil tigers have been found in the New Siberian
Islands in the Arctic Sea; in fact, the tiger never
was an animal peculiar to the tropics, and there are
good reasons for supposing that it is only within a
comparatively late period that his range has extended
as far south as India, where he keeps himself per-
sistently in the shade, and wallows constantly in the
mud during the burning heat of the dry season.
Like the lion, he is gradually being driven out by
the sportsman and the cultivator, and in many places
his haunts are confined to the islands in the rivers.
He is never as bold in look as the lion so often is,
but goes slouching and slinking along like a true
cat; and even in attack he seldom takes his hind
legs off the ground, but rushes instead of springing
at his prey. He makes for the nape of the victim’s
neck, and his ‘kill’ can always be recognised by his
78 MAMMALS
beginning to feed on it at its hind quarters, while the
leopard begins at the shoulders.
The leopard (/. pardus) is recognisable at once
by his spots. He comes next in size to the lion and
tiger, and, unlike them, he can climb a tree. He is
found all over Africa, and in Asia ranges from Pales-
LEOPARDS
tine to Manchuria, and southwards of that line into
India and. Malaysia. Like the tiger, his coat is more
woolly in the colder climates, and its colour varies
according to his haunts. Occasionally he is almost
black ; but just as the ordinary black cat shows the
tabby stripes when seen in a good light, so does the
THE JAGUAR 79
black leopard his rings and rosettes. At one time some
of his varieties were called panthers, but there are no
panthers nowadays. Structurally there was no differ-
ence between the varieties, and the discovery of the
complete series of intermediate coat patterns proved
that panther and leopard were identical.
The ounce, or snow-leopard (F. uucza), is a Central
Asian species, ranging north and south of the Altai
Mountains, and rarely below the snow-line. It is a
whitish animal with black rings about the size of a
crown piece, the fur being very long and not unlike
that of a Persian cat. The leopard has been measured
to reach eight feet in length; the snow-leopard has
not been known to exceed seven feet six inches. Like
the puma, it is said never to attack man except in
self-defence.
The leopards have their spots arranged apparently
at random. The jaguar (F. onca) has his in fairly
well-marked rows, and they are larger. As there are
black leopards, so there are black jaguars, and the
ground colour of his coat also varies from yellow to
nearly a tan.
The jaguar is an American animal, ranging
from Texas to Patagonia, and is so good a climber
‘that in some districts he becomes almost entirely
arboreal, and feeds on the monkeys and other in-
habitants of the trees. In other parts the jaguar
becomes almost a fishing-cat, and has been watched
standing in the shallow bend of a river, knocking out
the fish with the lightning stroke of his powerful
paw. In other places he devotes his attention to
turtle, tearing the upper shell from the lower at a
80 MAMMALS.
single pull, and making but a mouthful or two of the
contents. He is a big handsome fellow, over six feet
long, tail and all, and is as often killed with the lasso
or bolas as with dogs and poisoned arrows. He is
notoriously noisy, roaring much by night, and espe-
cially before bad weather.
A significant habit on the part of the jaguar
is noticed by Darwin: ‘One day, when hunting
on the banks of the Uruguay, I was shown certain
trees to which these animals constantly recur for the
purpose, as it is said, of sharpening their claws. I
saw three well-known trees; in front the bark was
worn smooth, as if by the breast of the animal, and
on each side there were deep scratches, or rather
grooves, extending in an oblique line, nearly a yard
in length. The scars were of different ages. A
common method of ascertaining whether a jaguar is
in the neighbourhood is to examine these trees. I
imagine this habit of the jaguar is exactly similar to
one which may any day be seen in the common cat,
as, with outstretched legs and exserted claws, it
scrapes the leg of a chair; and I have heard of
young fruit-trees in an orchard in England having
been thus much injured. Some such habit must also
be common to the puma, for on the bare, hard soil of
Patagonia I have frequently seen scores so deep that
no other animal could have made them. The object
of this practice is, I believe, to tear off the ragged
points of their claws, and not, as the gauchos think,
to sharpen them.’
The jaguar is the tiger of the New World ; the
puma is the lion. The puma (/. concolor) ranges
82 MAMMALS
from New England and British Columbia in the
north to Tierra del Fuego in the south. As his
specific name implies, he is all of one colour, a tawny |
brown, which is, however, much lighter in shade
below. In the young, however, there are distinct
spots, evidently a case of atavism, as with the young
of the lion. Pumas over eight feet long from the tip
of the nose to the tip of the tail have been reported,
as also have entirely white specimens ; but these are
exceptional ; the average length is about seven fect.
The puma is amzgo del cristeano, which we may
translate, not too literally, as the ‘white man’s friend.’
He rarely attacks man unless forced to do so.
As Mr. Lydekker observes in Zhe Royal Natural
History, ‘It is notorious that, in places where pumas
abound, it is perfectly safe for a child to wander alone,
and even sleep, on the pampas.’ But this respect
and good-fellowship extend to man alone. ‘Very
different is the behaviour of the puma when attacked
by a hunter accompanied by dogs. At such times
the animal is roused to the fiercest paroxysms of
rage ; and with hair erect and eyes flashing like balls
of lurid fire, it rushes, spitting and snarling, on the
dogs, utterly regardless of the presence of the hunter,
So thoroughly, indeed, is the hunter ignored on such
occasions, that he may actually belabour the puma
on the head with a cudgel without drawing its attack
upon himself, the animal receiving such blows with-
out retaliation, and calmly waiting its opportunity of
making a rush upon the dogs.’ And he is quite as
hostile to a far more formidable foe, the jaguar. ‘It
is well known, says Mr. W. H. Hudson, ‘that, where
THE PUMA 83
the two species inhabit the same district, they are at
enmity, the puma being the persistent persecutor of
the jaguar, following it and harassing it as a tyrant-
bird harasses an eagle or hawk, moving about it with
such rapidity as to confuse it, and when an oppor-
tunity occurs, springing upon its back, and inflicting
terrible wounds with teeth and claws.’ In the north
the puma is bold enough to attack the grizzly bear.
The puma’s ‘kill’ can generally be recognised by its
having its neck broken, the.animal springing on the
shoulders, and then drawing back the head with one
of its paws until the vertebre break.
He is not the only American cat without spots
or stripes on his mature coat. In the central dis-
tricts of the continent there are the brownish-grey
jaguarondi, and the weasel-like eyra, which is almost
chestnut in colour. In the Eastern Hemisphere there
are also two uniformly-coloured small cats, these
being the flat-headed cat of Malaysia and the
Bornean bay cat. And just as Asia has its black-
spotted snow-leopard, so has South America its
white-and-black, but much smaller, colocollo. The
most southerly cat is the pampas-cat, which is prac-
tically confined to Patagonia, and may be considered
as the representative of the manul, which lives in
the deserts of Central Asia. The chief African
small cat is the serval, which may, however, occa-
sionally attain a length of nearly five feet over all.
Like other cats, it has a tendency to ‘melanism,’
there being a black variety in the Kilima-njaro
district. Melanism, of course, means the change to
blackness, just as albinism means the change to
F 2
84 MAMMALS
whiteness. The ‘melanotic domestic cat’ is the
common or garden black cat of our everyday ac-
quaintance. Another noteworthy cat is the fishing-cat
of South-Eastern Asia and Formosa, and another is
the Indian jungle-cat, with its hair-tipped ears,
which differs but slightly from the caracal that, in .
its turn, leads on to the lynxes, which are found all
round the Northern Hemisphere. Two other cats of
importance are the Egyptian cat (/. caffra), from
which the domestic cats of Europe are probably
descended, and the Indian desert-cat (/ ornata),
from which the domestic cats of Asia came, the
Persian breed being by some naturalists considered
to trace its pedigree back to the manul. But we
have had cats enough. Two we must mention—the
Malaysian clouded leopard, or ‘tiger of the trees,’
which lives on the birds and small mammals it can
catch among the branches, and the long-legged,
small-headed Indian hunting leopard, which differs
so much from the rest in its appearance, in its teeth,
and in its claws, that it is now no longer classed
as a Felzs, but has a genus to itself, being known as
Cynelurus gubatus.
Among the fossils of the Miocene we find the
intermediate forms by which the gap is bridged be-
tween the Melde and the Viverride. The civets
are an interesting but somewhat odoriferous group,
confined, with two exceptions, to Africa and Southern
Asia. The most remarkable of them is, perhaps, the
peculiarly savage fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox), the
largest carnivore of Madagascar, which is plantigrade
in its hind feet and digitigrade in its front feet, which
HYAINAS 85
alone are padded. He has thirty-six teeth ; the true
civets have forty. There is only one true civet (Vzverra
ctvetta) in Africa; all the others are Asiatic. In
Miocene times there were civets in Europe, and even
in England. The genets are nearly all African,
though one of them (Genetta vulgaris) ranges into
the south of France, having, like the magot, pro-
bably crossed at Gibraltar before the straits existed.
The linsangs are all Asiatic but one, and he is found
on the West Coast of Africa; the palm-civets are
also Asiatic, with a single representative on the West
Coast of Africa. The binturong, or bear-cat, has a
genus to himself (Avctzetzs) ; he lives in the trees, as
do the palm-civets. Another of the family having a
genus to himself is the Cywogale of Malaysia, who is
happy in his varied fare, for not only does he climb
trees and eat fruit, but he hunts on land for mam-
malian flesh, and swims and dives in the water in
search of fishes and crabs. To the last group of
the Viverride belong the weasel-like mongooses of
which we have heard so much with regard to their
vermin-catching and snake-destroying powers. One
of these (Herpestes urva) devotes himself mainly to
the pursuit of frogs and crabs. Another (HZ. zchneu-
mon) has an insatiable appetite for crocodile eggs.
The sole representative of the Proteleide is the
African Aard-wolf, who is not unlike a hyzena, with a
pointed muzzle and long ears, and five toes instead
of four on his front paws. He feeds mainly on
white ants and carrion, and lives in a burrow of his
own making.
The hyenas are the most dog-like of the cats, and
86 MAMMALS
though generally given a bad name, are by no means
untamable, and have even been used as watchdogs.
Like dogs, their claws are not retractile. They have
the strongest jaws of all the carnivores, their conical
premolars being so buttressed up with fore-and-aft
tubercles that, aided by the flesh-teeth and tusks, a
hyzena, as Mr. Lydekker says, ‘is able to crunch in
its jaws the shin-bone of an ox almost as readily as
a dog can break that of a fowl.’ There are quite a
number of species of hyzena, but three only are now
known as living. Of these, the striped one (7. striata)
is both Asiatic and African; but the brown one (ZH.
brunnea) and the spotted or laughing one (4. crocuta)
are exclusively African.
The striped hyzena seems to have ranged over all
the Old World, and is an animal of respectable
antiquity, for its teeth have been found fossil even in
England. In Syria and Palestine its favourite haunts
are the rock-cut tombs, but it does not confine its
attention to dead meat, for a donkey belonging to
one of Canon Tristram’s servants was killed by a
hyena, and it often carries off dogs and sheep and
goats. Like all hyzenas, it is very high and heavy on
the fore legs, and the prints made by the hind feet
are very light and small. Colonel Sykes brought
one of these hyenas home from India with him,
and placed it in the Zoological Gardens. It had
been as faithful and playful as many a dog. When
the colonel paid any of his occasional visits to the
Gardens, it always recognised him instantly among
the crowd. One day when he came, the hyzna was
asleep and he called it by name. The animal jumped
ANECDOTE OF A HYANA 87
up and rushed at the bars of the cage to rub its head
there, and then bounded about, yelping its joy. When
the colonel went away it invariably stood and looked
after him mournfully until he was out of sight.
The brown hyzena has a much more woolly coat
than the others. He is found in both East and West
Africa, on the rocky districts near the coast, and in
the east he has been seen on Kilima-njaro. The
spotted hyzena is the largest of the existing species ;
his legs are more equal in length than those of the
others, and he is also distinguished from them by his
teeth. In early days he ranged all over Europe, and
his remains have even been found in Yorkshire and
the Mendips. He hunts in packs and is a singularly
daring and vigorous animal. According to Mr. H. H.
Johnston, he will not only carry off sheep and calves,
but even children. Mr. Johnston gives an instance
of one attempting to possess himself of a sick man.
Mr. Galton relates how one tried to run off with an
old woman, in one of the best hyzna stories yet
published :—‘ This man’s nose,’ he says, ‘was seized
by a hyena while he was asleep on his back—very
unpleasant, and an excellent story to frighten children
with. I could hardly believe it, until a case occurred
quite a propos. An old Bushwoman, who encamped
under the lee of a few sticks and reeds that she had
bent together, after the custom of those people, was
sleeping coiled up close round the fire, with her lank
feet straggling out in the dark, when a hyena, who
was prowling about in the early morning, laid hold
of her heel and pulled her bodily half out of the
hut. Her howls alarmed the hyzna, who quitted his
88 MAMMALS
hold ; and she hobbled up next morning to us for
plaisters and bandages. The very next night the
old lady slept in the same fashion as before, and the
hyena came in the same way and tugged at her
heel, just as he had done the previous evening. The
poor creature was in a sad state, and one of Mr.
Hahn’s men sat up the next night to watch for the
animal. I squatted in the shade of her house, my
companion covered a side-path, and the woman
occupied her hut as a bait. It was a grand idea,
that of baiting with an old woman. The hyena
came along the side-path, and there received his
quietus.’
The dogs (Canide@) are found in all the five con-
tinents. Their dental formula we have given, but it
is important to notice that their upper flesh-tooth,
which is the fourth premolar, has a stout bilobed
blade, while the lower flesh-tooth, or first molar, has
a compressed bilobed blade A dog is longer than
a cat in the muzzle, and shorter in the tail ; his skull
is longer, with the orbits very wide behind; and his
shoulder-girdle is different, the clavicles being small.
Dogs, as a rule, hunt in packs, and run their prey
down, while cats hunt singly, and take their prey by
surprise. Dogs are an oldish family in the world,
but we have only to go deep enough into the rocks
to find that they and the civets had a common
ancestor.
Domesticated dogs appear to be in all cases
merely tame varieties of the local wild dogs, modified
according to man’s fancy by careful cross-breeding.
Among the wild representatives of the genus the
JACKALS 89
largest are the wolves, of which but one species—
that peculiar to the Falkland Islands—is known
south of the equator. The typical wolf (C. lupus)
is yellowish grey, but there are red wolves, and
black wolves, and white wolves, and, in Tibet, a
shaggy black-and-white variety. The coyote (C.
_latrans) is much smaller than the common wolf, and
his coat varies with the season from reddish brown to
whitish grey. He is a North American, heard of in
late years as far south as Costa Rica, driven south, so
the theory goes, by constant persecution. Between
his present southerly limit and his Falkland cousin
(C. antarcticus) there is the whole length of South
America. Another wolf, with a species to himself,
is the Abyssinian one (C. szmensis), but he is half a
jackal.
The jackals are smaller than the wolves. They
have a wide distribution in the Old World, being
found in South Eastern Europe, in Southern Asia,
and, at odd intervals, all the way down East
Africa from Egypt to the Cape, and even in the
Gaboon country on the other coast. No jackal is
particular in his diet, but, besides acting as scavenger,
he enjoys fresh meat occasionally, and will bring
down young or weakly goats and sheep when he has
a chance; he is as fond of poultry as a fox, and
varies his meals with maize, sugar-cane, and fruits.
That he is not as truly carnivorous as the wolf might
be guessed from his flesh-teeth, which are much
smaller in proportion to the molars adjoining them.
Next to the wolves and jackals come the dogs,
of which the chief wild species are the Australian
go MAMMALS
dingo, the Siberian dog, the Indian dog, the raccoon-
dog of China, and the colpeo, and two or three other’
South American species, including the carasissi (C.
cancrivorus), which, like the crab-eating macaque and
the cynogale, is not above adding crustaceans to his
SS ey bb
ESKIMO DOGS
bill of fare. The wildest of the domesticated varie-
ties is that known as the Eskimo dog, which, with a
slight difference in colour, is found on both sides of
the Arctic Sea. On the American side his life has
often been described ; on the Asiatic side he has a
harder time of it when at work, but he has a summer
ESKIMO DOG 9g!
holiday, in which he is turned out to run wild and
find his own living. ‘During this time, says Dr.
Guillemard, ‘he wanders over the country at will,
sometimes returning at night to his burrow, at others
being absent for days together. A good hunter and
fisherman, he supports himself upon the game and
salmon he catches, and it is but rarely that he deserts
his master for good. But the inhabitants have to pay
a good price for his services. Owing to his rapacity,
it is impossible to keep sheep, goats, or any of the
smaller domestic animals, and Kamschatka is one of
the few countries in the world where fowls are un-
known,’
The Eskimo dog never forgets his skill as a
hunter. One among many instances of this was
afforded by a dog of this variety who belonged to a
gentleman in Edinburgh. Whenever he was fed,
he would carefully strew some of the meat about
in a half-circle to entice fowls and rats, and he would
then lay himself down and pretend to be asleep,
ready to pounce upon and kill the first luckless
creature that fell into the temptation. The domesti-
cated dog comes of an intelligent family ; his cousins,
the wolves and foxes, are anything but dull, and man
has been doing his best for thousands of years to
develop that natural intelligence on human lines.
Man may not have entirely transformed the psycho-
logy of the dog, as Dr. Romanes thought, but ‘the
gigantic experiment upon the potency of individual
experience, accumulated by heredity, has certainly
produced the nearest approach to reason found
amongst the carnivores.
92 MAMMALS
The foxes are said to be distinguishable from the
dogs by their bushier tails, their more pointed muzzles,
and their oval-eyed pupils, which are set somewhat on
A GROUP OF FENNECS
the slant; but these differences want a good deal ot
looking for when comparing a South American dog
with a North American fox. The common fox
FOXES 93
(C. vulpes), in its many varieties, is found practically
all round the northern world, and always bears the
same character of being an exceedingly smart indi-
vidual, well able to take care of himself. The Arctic
fox (C. lagopus) changes his coat in winter to a pure
white. The corsac fox of the Asian deserts also
changes his coat, but not to the same extent, his
hairs becoming merely ringed with white. The
largest of the short-eared foxes is the so-called grey-
hound fox of North Britain. The smallest is C.
canus, the hoary fox of Baluchistan. Differing but
slightly from the true foxes are the fennecs, those
quaint little creatures with big, wide ears and bushy
tails, which, in two species, are found in North Africa,
and in Persia and Afghanistan, the intermediate
form being the South African asse fox (C. chama),
which lives to a great extent on ostrich eggs, rolling
them along from their nest to its burrow, and there
breaking them against a stone.
With the bears we enter on the third section of
the fissiped carnivora. The bears themselves are’
so distinct in appearance that there is no difficulty in
identifying them now, but in the past, during the
existence of the dog-like bears and bear-like dogs, it
would not have been so easy to draw the line. There
are but three living genera, Ursus, Melursus and
Ailuropus, the last having but one species, the black-
and-white or parti-coloured bear of Tibet, which is
not really a carnivore but a herbivore ; Melursus also
having but one species, the Indian sloth-bear, which
feeds upon fruits and flowers and ants and honey, and
94. MAMMALS
is hunted by the southern hill-tribesmen with poles
smeared with bird-lime.
The bear which has been longest known to Euro-
peans is Bruin, the brown bear (UV. arctos), found all
over Northern Europe and Asia, as far south as the
Himalayas and the Pyrenees, and in one of its varieties,
Crowther’s bear, even in the Atlas range of Northern
Africa. The brown bear ‘eats almost anything, and
fattens himself up for the winter, when he makes
himself comfortable in a cave or hollow tree and
takes a long sleep until the weather becomes warmer,
when he goes forth, looking miserably thin, to get
himself into condition. It is during this period of
hibernation that the young are born, two or three
cubs at a time, blind for a month and nurslings for
two months more.
The biggest of the bears seems to be the
Polar one (U. maritimus), who is the only white bear.
He has a much longer head than the others and it is
smaller in proportion to his bulk. He is the most
carnivorous of the bears, and the most aggressive
towards man ; awkward as he looks, he gets over ice
at a great rate, and he swims magnificently. Some
years ago the Polar bear at the Zoological Gardens
escaped, and was discovered early one morning near
the dromedary house by a blacksmith, who had come
to his work. The blacksmith, says Mr. Broderip,
looked at the white bear, and the white bear looked
at the blacksmith, who, like a valiant and wise smith,
did not run, but stood his ground and shouted,
whereupon the bear retreated into a bush of laurel.
Presently the bear put forth his nose, as if meditating
THE POLAR BEAR
96 MAMMALS
an advance, when the smith shouted again, and the
bear again drew back. This continued till the shouts
of the man collected some of the keepers, who
instantly took measures for his recapture. One of
them advanced with a strong rope which had a
running noose, and threw it over the monster’s neck,
and then he pulled and the bear pulled till the rope
broke. The bear quietly lifted his arm and with his
forepaw disembarrassed himself of the noose. The
keeper, nothing daunted, caught him with another
rope, ‘and a struggle ensued, the infuriated beast
biting the rope till he got free, and walking on, fol-
lowed by a detachment of keepers, who managed, by
heading him at proper intervals and showing a bold
front, to keep him out of the park. While they
were trying to prevent this, he made a desperate, ©
but luckily ineffectual, rush at one of the men. At
last, by dint of marches and counter-marches, they
so managed their tactics that they drove him
gradually up to the door of a den which stood in-
vitingly open, and in he went and was secured,
not, however, without dashing with all his weight and
strength at the gate of his new prison.’
The grizzly bear (U. horribzlis) is near akin to the
brown bear, but he differs in some trifling respects,
and he is larger. Nowadays his home is the Rocky
Mountains, all the way down into Mexico. His
main food is flesh, but -he will fatten on nuts and
acorns, and along the Pacific slope he is fond of fish,
and will wade into the water, knocking out the
salmon right and left when they are running thick.
Although he is fierce enough, he will in these days
THE GRIZZLY BEAR
98 oe MAMMALS
rarely attack man unprovoked, many of the rushes .
we hear of being due to his attempt to bolt into
safety by the shortest road, or rolling downhill
when shot. Often when surprised he will run away
from man. Mr. Baillie-Grohman gives an amusing
instance of this in Camps in the Rockies. ‘1 was
about to stoop,’ he says, ‘to gather in the prize’—a
fly he had caught to fish with—‘when out of the
bushes, as if growing from the earth, there rose a
grizzly. Rearing up on his hind legs, as they in-
variably do on being surprised, he stood, his head
and half-opened jaws a foot and a half or two feet
over my six foot of humanity, and hardly more
than a yard between gigantic him and pigmy me.
The reader will believe me when I say he looked
the biggest grizzly I ever saw, or want to see so
close. It would be difficult to say who was the
more astonished of the two, but I know very well
who was the most frightened. My heart seemed
all of a sudden to be in two places ; for, had I not
felt a big lump of it in my throat, I could have
sworn it was leaking out at a big rent in the toes of
my moccasins. Fortunately, the Old Uncle of the
Rockies had more than probably never had anything
to do with human beings, for I saw very plainly that
he was more puzzled as to my identity than I was
regarding his. His small, pig eyes were not very
ferocious-looking, and first one then the other ear
would move, expressing, as I interpreted it, more im-
patience than ill-feeling. I do not exactly remember
who first moved, but I do recollect that, on looking
back over my shoulder, I saw the old gentleman
|
ror BOYS anp GIRLS
ade NON HPT HGH Event eM Budd S12 ect Ppleener HM Dye esse oye (ory tate Mom ROTI bad ELST OH be Hat: Pos hires tics met ALU Mteal saab ect taaerr tt esky Bel Brier aR Ted
The Baldwin Library
FIGHT BETWEEN AN ELEPHANT AND A TIGER
POPULAR
NATURA EIStORny
FOR BOYS AND GIRLS
BY
W. J. GORDON
AUTHOR OF ‘OUR COUNTRY’S BIRDS’ ‘HOW LONDON LIVES ETC.
WITH EIGHTY-SIX ENGRAVINGS
LONDON
THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY
56 PATERNOSTER Row aNp 65 ST Paut’s CuurcuyarpD
1894
CONTENTS
ANTHROPOIDEA
Chimpanzee .
Gorilla
Orang
Gibbons
Monkeys
Baboons
Hanuman
Langurs
’ Macaques
Chacma
Spider Monkeys
Capuchin Monkeys
pense :
EMUROIDEA .
Lemurs .
Aye-aye
CHIROPTER A
Bats .
Fox-Bat
Insectivorous Bats
Vampire Bat .
INSECTIVORA .
Shrews .
Mole
CARNIVORA .
Lion. .
Tiger
SS nclal
CHAPTER I
MAMMALS
PAGE
17, | CARNIVORA (ae) )—
19 Leopard . ;
22 | Ounce
27 Jaguar
29 Puma
32 | Cats .
33° | Civet
36 Hyeena
37 Dog
38 Wolf
40 | Jackal
43 | Fox .
44 | Brown Bear
47 Polar Bear
48 Grizzly Bear .
48 Black Bear
52 | Panda
54 Marten
54 |} Polecat .
56 Weasel
58 Skunk
64 Badger
64 Otter
66 Sea-Lion .
66 Sea-Bear
67 Walrus
70 Sea- pe
76 Seal
108
RODENTIA
Squirrel
Marmot
Beaver
Mouse .
Rat .
Porcupine
Hare
Rabbit .
CETACEA
Whales .
Narwhal
Dolphin
Porpoise .
UNGULATA
Cattle
Bison
Bighorn
Horned Sheep
Goat.
Antelope
Giraffe
Deer
Elk .
Reindeer
Moose
CARINAT AE
Dipper .
Song birds
Nightingale
Mocking-bird
Skylark.
Thrush :
Birds of Paradise
Woodpecker
THumming-birds
Parrots
Owls
Vultures
Hawks .
CONTENTS
PAGE
. 1 | UNGULATA (cont.)\—
. III Camel :
cele Liama
. 114 Pig : B
. 118 Hippopotamus .
. 120 Tapir ,
. 120 Horse
Bel 22 Zebra
., 122 Ass .
. 123 Rhinoceros
. 123 Hyrax
. 127 Elephant
. 129 | SZRENIA
. 129 Manati .
. 130 Dugong.
. 133 | EDENTATA
» 134 Sloth
. 134 Ant-eater
Bel o4 Armadillo .
. 139 Pangolin .
. 139 | MARSOPIALIA .
ASTad ad Opossum
- 145 Kangaroo . ‘
. 145 | MONOTREMATA
. 148 | Duckmole .
. 148 Echidna
CHAPTER II
BIRDS
. 194 | CARINAT HAE (cont.)-—
. 196 Pelicans : a
. 196 Storks
. 200 Flamingoes
. 200 Geese
- 201 Ducks
» 201 Gulls
. 202 Condor
. 205 | RATITA.
. 206 Ostrich
. 206 Rhea
. 207 Emu.
. 207 Kiwi
. 207 | SAURURA.
PAGE
- 149
- 154
- 154
. 156
. 158
- 159
. 161
. 162
. 162
. 167
. 168
- 173
» 174
» 174
» 175
- 175
. 176
. 177
. 178
» 179
. 180
. 182
. 184
. 185
. 186
. 208
. 208
. 208
. 208
. 208
. 209
. 210
. 215
. 216
. 216
. 216
. 216
. 217
CROCODILIA .
Crocodiles.
Gharials
Alligators .
OPHIDIA
Rattlesnake
Vipers
Sea-Snakes
Hamadryad
Cobras
ECAUDATA
Frogs 3
Horned Frogs
Toads
TELEOSTEI
Perch
Bream
Shad.
Archer-fish
Weevers
Mackerel .
Sword-fish
Angler-fish
Stickleback
Cod . :
Turbot .
Herring
Cat-fish .
Carp.
Salmon .
CONTENTS
CHAPTER III
REPTILES
PAGE
- 219 | OPHIDIA (cont.)—
. 219 Boas f
. 220 Pythons :
yee 221 | LACHER TTL Id +
222 Lizards
. 225 Blindworm
. 226 Chameleon
. 226 | CHELONIA
e227: Tortoises .
. 227 Turtles .
CHAPTER IV
AMPHIBIANS
- 235 | CAUDATA .
» 235 Newt
» 235 Salamander
. 235 | APODA
CHAPTER V
FISHES
» 240 | TELEOSTET (cont.)—
. 241 Arapaima .
» 241 Pilchard
. 241 | Sardine
2A Qe Sea-horse
- 242 | GANOIDES.
e242 tel Sturgeon
224301 Pike
. 246 | DIPNOT
. 246 | Barramunda :
- 247°, ELASMOBRANCA/
- 247 Sharks F
. 247 Saw-fish
PAY, Rays
. 248 Skate
« 248 Eagle-Ray
vii
PAGE
. 228
. 228
. 228
. 228
. 230
. 230
. 230
- 231
ma2gr
. 238
. 238
- 239
» 239
. 248
. 249
+ 249
- 249
. 250
. 250
» 250
Zoid
. 251
e252
. 252
» 254
» 255
» 255
» 255
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Giraffes '
PAGE
Fight between an Elephant and
a Tiger frontispiece
A young Chimpanzee 14
_ The Gorilla : : 19
The White-collared Mangabey 38
The Red-faced Spider ro 45
Marmosets . 5 49
The Brown Mouse-Lemur 50
Skeleton of Bat. . : 55
The Collared Fruit-Bat . 57
Head of Long-eared Bat 59
Long-eared Bats F 60
Long-eared Bat sleeping 61
Barbastelle Bat walking . 62
Head of Vampire Bat 63
Water Shrews 65
Skeleton of a Lion 69
Lions 5 71
Lioness and Cubs 75
Leopards 78
A Puma 81
Eskimo Dogs 90
A Group of Fennecs . 92
The Polar Bear 95
The Grizzly Bear . 97
Grizzly Bear in a Aap 99
Black Bear IOI
The Otter 103
The Walrus 105
The Northern Sea-Bear . . 109
The Russian Biying Pai » 115
Beavers Sly
Field Voles . 119
Harvest Mice I2T
The Porcupine . SIpl22)
The Narwhal . 128
A School of Porpoises . 131
The American Bison - 135
The Musk Ox . . 136
The Alpine Ibex . 138
The Cabul Markhor . . 140
Head of Gemsbok. » 141
Water-Buck . 142
» 145
PAGE
Reindeer . - 147
The Moose » 149
Camels . I51
Llamas . : - 153
The Hog-Deer of Celebes Beeesee ici
The Common Hippopotamus . 157
Skull of the Hippopotamus . 158
Skeleton of the Horse . 160
Indian Rhinoceros - 163
The Hyrax or Coney - 168
The Great Ant-cater . . 176
Opossum with its Young . 181
Kangaroos . 183
The Duckmole . 185
Lawes’s Echidna . 187
The Ostrich . : . 188
Skeleton of a Bird . 190
Breastbone of Owl . I9QI
Parts of a Bird . . 192
A Bird’s Leg . 193
The Dipper Tals
The Nightingale =. 197,
The Blackcap . 198
The Reed Warbler « 199
Shooting Birds of Paradise . 203
Weaver Bird and Nest . 204
The Nightjar. 205
The Sword-bill Humming- Bird 208
The Concave Hornbill . 207
The Griffon Vulture owe TT
The Kiwi. ; . 217
Head of a Crocodile . 220
Head of a Gharial . 220
Head of an Alligator A221
The Tiger-snake of Australia . 223
Skeleton of a Python . 224
The Rattlesnake . 226
The Cobra di Capello o5 227,
The Moloch Lizard . 229
The Matamata . 232
Transformations of the hi rog . 237
The Nest of the Stickleback . 245
The Hammer-headed Shark . 253
A BRIEF EXPLANATION OF SOME OF THE
SCIENTIFIC TERMS USED IN THIS BOOK
As the paraphrases adopted in many popular natural history books are
more or less incorrect, it has been decided in the present volume
to give the proper scientific terms. This compels the use of some-
what long words, such as ‘anthropoidea,’ ‘carnivora,’ &c. To
enable the young reader to understand exactly what these mean, a
brief glossary is here given. It is hoped that this may help beginners
to make an intelligent use of the book, and also afford pleasant
exercise in the way of word study.
Albinism, The absence of the usual colouring matters in the skin and
its appendages.
Anchylosis, The union of two bony surfaces by osseous or fibrous
matter.
Anoura. An old term for the tailless Amphibians.
Anthropoidea. Those monkeys which most nearly approach man in
form.
Antlers, The horns of the deer. ;
Agoda. Animals without limbs; the worm-like Amphibians.
Artiodactyla. Ungulates having an even number of toes on their fect.
Atavism. The recurrence of an ancestral peculiarity.
Atrophied. Arrested in development at an early period of growth.
Atlas. The vertebra of the neck which directly supports the skull.
Axis. The second vertebra of the neck, on which the skull and atlas
generally work. :
Baleen. Whalebone.
Batrachia. An old name for the Frogs, Toads, Salamanders, &c.
Brachium. The upper arm.
Branchia, The gill of a fish 3 an organ adapted for breathing the air
dissolved in water.
Bronchi. The branches of the windpipe by which air is conveyed to
the lung vesicles.
Bruta. An old name of the Edentates.
Canide. Dog-like animals.
Canine. The eye-tooth (see Dental Formula).
Carinate. Birds with a sharp breast-bone, like a keel (cavéa).
Carnassials, The flesh teeth of the Carnivores.
Carnivora. The animals which feed on flesh.
x BRIEF EXPLANATION OF SCIENTIFIC TERMS
Carpus. The wrist.
Catarrhine. Narrow-nosed; a term applied to the monkeys of the
Eastern Hemisphere.
Caudata. The tailed Amphibians, such as Newts and Salamanders.
Cavicorns. The hollow-horned Ruminants, such as oxen and sheep.
Cervical. Pertaining to the neck.
Cetacea. The whales and dolphins.
Chelonia. The tortoises, turtles, &c.
Chiroptera. The hand-winged mammals ; that is to say, the Bats.
Chordates. Animals having a spinal cord.
Coleoptera. An order of insects including the beetles.
Clavicles. The collar-bones ; the bones that together form the merry-
thought in birds.
Coccyx. The lower end of the spinal column.
Condyle. The surface by which one bone articulates with another.
Coracotd. The bone in the shoulder-girdle, which is a mere process of
the scapula in mammals, but is well developed in birds.
Coriaceous. Leathery.
Costal. Pertaining to the ribs.
Creodonta. Primitive carnivores, whose lower molar teeth are generally
shaped like flesh-teeth. (See Dental Formula.)
Cuspfidate. Waving small pointed elevations or ‘ cusps.’
Cutaneous. Pertaining to the skin.
Dental Formula. A short method of describing the number and de-
scription of the teeth. Adult man, for instance, has 32 teeth, of
which 16 are in the upper jaw and 16 in the lower. Each set of
16 consists of 4 ‘incisors’ in front, then 2 ‘canines,’ one on each
side, then 4 ‘premolars,’ 2 on each side, and then 6 ‘molars,’
being 3 on each side. As there are the same number of teeth in
each half-jaw, the set can be briefly tabulated as incisors 2, canines 1,
premolars 2, molars 3; or for upper and lower jaws 7. 2, c. 4,
p.m. 2, m. %; but as the series is always in the same order the
letters can be dispensed with, and the formula further abbreviated
into 2428, In man both jaws have the same number of teeth, but
this is not the case among all the mammals. The canines are fre-
quently known as the eye-teeth, and the premolars as the bicuspids.
Dermal. Pertaining to the integument,
Dextral, Right-handed.
Diastema. A gap, such as the interval in the jaw of the Ruminants.
Diastole, The expansion of a contractile cavity.
Didelphia, Another name for the Marsupials.
Differentiation, The separation of parts which are united in siinpler
forms of life.
Digit. A finger or toe.
Diphyodont, Waving two sets of teeth.
Dipnot. Double-breathing fishes.
Dorsal. Pertaining to the back.
Ldentata, Mammals which have no front or incisor teeth,
BRIEF EXPLANATION OF SCIENTIFIC TERMS xi
Elasmobranchti. Fishes having gills like plates.
Eocene. The lowest division of the Tertiary rocks.
felide., Cat-like animals.
femur. The thigh-bone.
fibula. The outer bone of the leg.
frssipeds. The carnivora in which the toes are divided, as among the
cats and dogs.
furculum. The merrythought, which is formed of the united
clavicles.
Ganoidet. Fishes which have enamelled bony scales.
fabitat, The locality in which an animal naturally lives,
fHfallux. The great toe.
ffeterocercal. Unequally lobed.
Humerus. The bone of the upper arm,
4fyoid. The bone which supports the tongue.
Llium. The haunch bone.
fnguinal. Pertaining to the groin.
Lnsectivora. Animals which feed on insects.
Lnvertebrata. Animals without a backbone.
Lacertilia, Lizard-like animals (Zacertus, a lizard).
Larynx. The upper part of the windpipe, from which the voice is
produced in mammals.
Lemuroidea. Animals of which the lemur is the type.
Ligamentum nuche. The neck ligament which supports the head.
Lingual. Pertaining to the tongue.
Lumbar. Pertaining to the loins.
Alammatia, The vertebrate animals which suckle their young.
Mandible. The lower jaw. ~
Marsupialia. Mammals which carry their young in a pouch, like the
kangaroo. :
AMaxitila. The upper jaw.
Alelanism, An excess of colouring matters in the skin and its appen-
dages, thus producing blackness.
Molars. The grinder teeth.
Monophyodont. Waving only one set of teeth.
Neural. Pertaining to the nerves.
Nidification, _Nest-building.
Notochord. The chorda dorsalis, a longitudinal cellular rod developed
beneath the spinal cord, and replaced by the vertebral column
in the adults of such animals as have a backbone.
Odontoceti, The toothed whales.
Bsophagus. The gullet.
Oral. Pertaining to the mouth.
Opposable. That which may be opposed. A word used incorrectly as
descriptive of the power of the human subject to grip with the
thumb and second digit. It is impossible to ‘ oppose’ these in the
strict sense of the word, as the thumb must press sideways on the
forefinger and cannot be twisted so as to get in front of it. An
xii BRIEF EXPLANATION OF SCIENTIFIC TERMS
‘opposable toe’ is a great toe capable of being used in the way
that a thumb is. Owing to the invention of boots and sandals, the
great toe of man is now almost parallel in its action to that of the
second toe, but among savage races like the Zulus the spears are
picked up between the toes, and some of the natives of the West
Coast of Africa have the great toe-joint still so flexible that they can
use a hammer with their feet.
Ophidia. Snake-like animals.
Paleontology. The science of fossils.
Paleozoic. The oldest group of stratified rocks.
Patella. The knee-cap.
Pelvis. The division of the skeleton which consists of the sacrum,
coccyx, and haunch bones.
Lerissodactyla. Ungulates having an odd number of toes in their feet.
Pinnipeds. The Carnivores in which the toes are joined together, as
for example, the seals.
Plagiostomt. The fishes with the transverse mouths.
Pleistocene. The most recent rocks of the Tertiary period.
Platyrrhine. Broad-nosed; a term applied to the monkeys of the
Western Hemisphere.
Pollex. The thumb.
Prehensile. Capable of grasping.
Ramus. A half of the lower jaw.
Ratite. Birds with a flat breast-bone, like a raft (vatzs).
Rodentia. The animals that gnaw, sometimes called the Glres.
Saurure. Birds with lizard-like tails. Only fossil specimens known.
Ruminants. The animals that chew the cud.
Sacrum. The triangular bone at the base of the vertebral column
which forms the keystone of the pelvic arch.
Scapula. The shoulder-bone.
Simiide. Ape-like creatures (Greek. szvzos, ¢ flat-nosed ’).
Sirenta. Mammals, like the dugong, that live in the water (from
S2v€n).
Sternum. The breast-bone.
Tarsus. The ankle.
Teleostez. The bony fishes.
Thorax. The.chest.
Tibia. The shin-bone.
Ungulata. Animals which have hoofs.
Ventral. Pertaining to the under surface of the vertebrates.
Vertebrates. The animals having a backbone.
Viviparous. Bringing forth the young alive.
A YOUNG CHIMPANZEE
POPULAR NATURAL HISTORY
FOR BOYS AND GIRLS
CEA Pl Resi
MAMMALS
THERE are over two million species of animals on
this earth, and if we were merely to print their names,
we should have to mass eight thousand of them on
every page of this book. The numbers are, in fact,
so appalling and incomprehensible that it is simply
beyond human powers to realise the immensity and
variety of the mighty Creation amid which we live.
The wonderful is not necessarily the unknown ; in>
the known we have the wonderful with us.
The Creation has a long history, lost in the depths
of ages marked by constant change and continuous
life. The millions of forms that we know to-day are
but as nothing in comparison with those which have
vanished for ever in the onward march. Onward
unrestingly has come the great army of the living,
each form rising to suit its environment, and
failing as its environment was modified; Nature
16 MAMMALS
everywhere testifying to the infinity of its Author ;
never a living form transmitting its unaltered like-
ness to distant futurity, and yet nothing in the end
which was not also in the beginning. Truly a
wonderful world as it lies open to us, modelled and
moulded, as a whole and in its least molecule, with
grandeur, unfathomable intelligence, and inexhausti-
ble bounty.
During our lifetime our knowledge of animal life
in the present and the past has largely increased, and
the hard-and-fast frontier lines drawn by our fathers
have in many cases been wiped away, and in others
have been replaced by mere strips of debateable land.
Even among the greater divisions which seemed so
firmly established, many approximations have been
made out. The fishes, for instance, have been found
to be closely allied to the amphibians, the reptiles to
the birds, and even the vertebrates as a whole have
been shown to be so linked to the invertebrates that
zoologists are abandoning the backbone as a basis of
classification in favour of the spinal cord. Animals
are now sorted into chordates, hemi-chordates and so
on, and non-chordates ; the spinal cord in the chordates
being along the back, and the heart being ventral, while
the nerve cords of the non-chordates are along the
belly or the sides, the heart being dorsal; the inter-
mediate classes giving the intermediate stages in
which the animal forms appear to have gradually
turned upside down. On such technical details we
need not, however, dwell in this little book ; we have
merely mentioned them as illustrations of the ex-
ANTHROPOIDEA i7
treme unwisdom of arguing on the undiscovered, and
putting our trust in boundary lines.
The one central fact is the unity of creation.
The division into species-is merely a grouping of
individuals, no two of which are exactly alike, made
by man himself for his convenience in study and
treatment. He groups individuals into varieties,
varieties into species, species into genera, genera into
families, families into orders, orders into classes, and
at every stage is at the mercy of some fresh discovery,
if he has been presumptuous enough to act upon the
unknown. It is for this reason that natural-history
books go out of date, for no classification is on a
sound basis which is dependent on the assumed
absence of certain features or forms.
ANTHROPOIDEA.—From a man’s point of
view the animais highest in the scale of life are those
most like himself. He has a backbone, and con-
sequently he considers animals with a backbone to
_ be in a higher stage of development than those with-
q
out one. He is mammalian, and therefore puts the
mammals at the head of the vertebrate series, with
the birds on his flank, and the reptiles, amphibians,
and fishes following after. And in this arrangement
he is confirmed by the records of the rocks, which
have yielded so many intermediate forms, and which—
with their crowd of mammaliain their more recent beds,
the first appearance of reptiles at an earlier age, of
amphibians at a still earlier, of fishes at a still earlier,
and the persistence of invertebrates throughout, with
the obvious evidence of a gradual advance from the
B
18 MAMMALS
generalised to the specialised—have established the
theory of his classification on so broad a basis that
discussion as to the main question has practically
ceased, and the conflict now rages around the
secondary means. by which the changes have been
brought about.
Adopting, then, the usual plan, let us begin with
the animals between whom and ourselves there is, as
Sir Richard Owen said, ‘an all-prevailing similitude
of structure’ which is unmistakable, and an external
resemblance, particularly in their youth, which has in
all parts of the world procured for them among savage
races the local names of ‘wild men,’ ‘little men,’
‘hairy men, &c, by which we in so many cases
know them.
In the front rank of these come the chimpanzees,
the gorillas, the orangs, and the gibbons. These are
‘the man-like apes, the Szzéd@, which, with the old-
world monkeys, the American monkeys, and the
marmosets, form four out of five of the families of the
man-like animals included in the order of Anthro-
potdea ; the fifth family being the Homenide, to which
man, the type of the order, belongs. Opinions differ
as to which of the Szw#eczde@ should head the group.
The gorillas are most like man in size, but the
gibbons, which are not above three feet high, have
a much more human-looking skull, without ridges
or crests, and with a nearly upright forehead and a
well-shaped chin. The gorilla’s arms reach half-way
down his shins, but the arms of the gibbons are so
long that they can touch their toes with their fingers
as they walk ; and the gibbons can walk upright and
THE GORILLA 19
flat-footed at all ages, while the gorilla rarely walks
upright, except in infancy. In the structure of the
brain the orangs are most like man; but in other
respects, in the arms and hands and feet, and in the
THE GORILLA
jaws, the chimpanzees are so tnuch closer to the
human type that it is usual to begin with them.
There are two living species of chimpanzee now
recognised, zzger (the black) and caluus (the bald),
B2
20 MAMMALS
both being natives of Western and Central Africa.
The genus is known as Axthropopithecus, which
means the man-monkey. Chimpanzee itself should
really be written chimpa n’zee the n’see, being the
word now rendered as n’tyigo, the chzmpa being
descriptive of the sort of n’tyigo the natives wished
to distinguish. The generic name used to be 7vog-
lodytes, or ‘dwellers in caves, but this has gone the
way of Quadrumana and other familiar terms, as
being misleading when insisted upon too closely.
The chimpanzee is, in fact, not a cave-dweller but a
tree-dweller, and his home is a sort of platform, with
or without a roof, which he makes in the trees for the
shelter of his family. ‘ With regard to the arboreal
habits of the gorilla, writes Dr. Garner, ‘I think they
are somewhat misunderstood. He is a good climber
and evidently spends much of his time in trees; but
from an examination of his foot it is evident that he
was designed for terrestrial habits. The grasping
power of his foot is much less than that of the chim-
panzee, and is not at all to be compared in this respect
with his own hand; and all men whom I have
consulted upon this point agree with me that he
spends most of his life on the ground. During the
time that I kept a young gorilla in the bush with me,
I had also a chimpanzee ; and it was the daily habit
of the chimpanzee to climb about in the bushes,
while the gorilla rarely ever ascended one. I always
kept a supply of food for them where they could easily
secure it themselves at any time ; but the gorilla would
seldom climb even a few feet from the ground to
get himself a plantain, and when he did so, always
THE CHIMPANZEE 2t
descended again to the ground to eat it, whereas the
chimpanzee would occasionally take a banana and
climb into the bush to eat it. Both of these animals,
however, and also the native, climb in much the
same manner. They hold on to the sides of the
tree with the hands, place the bottom of the foot
obliquely on the side next to them, and walk up it,
meanwhile depending in a great degree on the big
toe. This toe, however, is very much larger in the
chimpanzee than in man ; itis, indeed, like the thumb,
one of the most variable characters of this group of
animals, and in the marmosets is nearly wanting
altogether.
The chimpanzee squats on his heels, the gorilla
sits down like a man, and sticks his legs out in front
of him. The male chimpanzee is five feet high at
the most, and the female is nearly as big, whereas the
male gorilla, who may exceed six feet in height, is
always much larger than the female. But the great
difference is in the faces, that of the gorilla having
the powerful brow-ridges which make him look so
brutish and ferocious, which ridges, like the crest on
the top of the skull, are almost absent in the females
and their young, and only grow into prominence as
the males approach maturity. The chimpanzees
have their eyebrows much less marked in both sexes,
and are altogether of more graceful build and
pleasanter appearance.
‘Sally, who lived for eight years at the Zoological
Gardens in the, Regent’s Park, was one of the bald
species. The experiments made on her by Dr.
Romanes are well known. She was apparently about
22 MAMMALS
as intelligent as a child might be within the last few
months of infancy, and had some notion of numbers
up to ten; but as far as her ‘language’ was dis-
coverable, it was limited to three sounds, one doing
duty for ‘Yes, another for ‘No, and another for
‘Thank you so much!’ She may, however, have
realised that ‘a still tongue makes a wise head ;’ at
any rate, like the little black chimpanzee now in her
place, she looked wise enough, particularly when boys
attempted to amuse themselves at her expense.
The gorilla (Gorlla Savage?) is so called after its
native name, the name of the species being in honour
of Dr. Savage, an English missionary in the Gaboon
country, who in 1847 sent drawings of its skull to
Sir Richard Owen. Du Chaillu published his account
of his discovery of this huge ape in 1861, but in 1860
there was a real live gorilla in this country in a
travelling show, whose proprietor was unaware of the
curiosity he possessed until after it was dead.
The gorilla is heavily built, as can be seen by the
skeletons in the top gallery at the Natural History
Museum at South Kensington, but this heaviness has
been exaggerated in most of the published woodcuts.
Like man and the chimpanzees, he has seventeen
joints in his backbone; but while man has twelve
ribs, he and the chimpanzees have thirteen. Another
point in which he resembles the chimpanzees is in
the absence of the ‘central’ bone in the wrist, which
is only found exceptionally in adult man. His teeth,
too, though similar in number and variety, are very
different in appearance from a man’s, owing to the
large size of the canines and wisdom teeth.
PEDIGREE OF GORILLA 23
In these comparisons with the human skeleton,
in this ‘stating of the animal kingdom in the terms of
man, it should be borne in mind that we are only
dealing with anatomical facts, and that it is not im-
plied, as the ignorant suppose, that man is descended
from any of the existing chimpanzees or gorillas or
orangs or gibbons. No one, indeed, ever said so, the
statement having been put about by heated dis-
putants in their attempts to destroy the unwelcome
by mere derision. The pedigree of the Homznide
must be taken back for an enormous period of time
before it touches the crossways whence that of the
man-like apes diverged fromit. But those crossways
it unmistakably reaches. Man is so intimately con-
nected, as far as his bodily structure goes, with the
higher apes that, as Mr. Lydekker says in 7ze
Royal Natural History, ‘in this respect at least he
cannot but be considered to have had a similar
origin.’ There is really no fundamental distinction
in anatomy between any member of the man-like
group, and they can only be regarded as diverging
branches from some ancestral form long since extinct,
as much unlike any living ape as such apes are un-
like man.
Of course, much depends on what is meant by
man, but in a zoological sense the Homznzd@ seem to
have been distinct from the Szszz¢de for at least as
long ago as the Miocene period of the earth’s exist-
ence.. This, it need hardly be said, has nothing to do
with the spiritual nature, nor even with the mental
powers and other human attributes, which so far
remove man from the brutes. ‘Viewed from the
24 MAMMALS
anatomical standpoint, says Professor Mivart, ‘man
is but one species of the order Primates; and he
even differs far less from the higher apes than do
these latter from the inferior forms of the order.
This work being purely anatomical, it is only needful
here to remind the reader of what common-sense
teaches us—that to estimate any object as a whole,
its powers of action no less than its structure must be
taken into consideration. The structure of the highest
plants is more complex than is that of the lowest
animals; but for all that, powers are possessed by
jelly-fishes of which oaks and cedars are devoid.
The self-conscious intelligence of man establishes
between him and all other animals a distinction far
wider than the mere superiority of his brain in mass
and complexity, or any other physical difference,
would indicate. ~All, however, who admit the idea of
man’s moral responsibility are logically compelled to
go much further, and to confess that in this respect
he is separated from the rest of the visible creation
by an abyss so vast that no chasm separating the
other kingdoms of nature from one another can be
compared with it.’
The words of the Psalmist, taken in their ordinary
signification, are as eloquent as they are true: ‘When
I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the
moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained ;
What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and
the son of man, that Thou visitest him? For Thou
hast made him but little lower than the angels, and
crownest him with glory and honour. Thou madest
him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands ;
BRAIN OF A GORILLA 25
Thou hast put all things under his feet : all sheep and
oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field ; the fowl of the
air, and the fish of the sea, whatsoever passeth through
the paths of the seas.’
The frame of man differs but little from that of
the living things around him, but his dominion over
them is palpable and undeniable. Year by year those
that might contest it with him, were it a matter of
structure alone, are edged away. The monsters of
the past and the present, the carnivores, the serpents,
every possibly dominant form of the air and land and
sea, struggle in vain against his superiority. And
every wild animal or wild plant that he judges in his
ignorance to be ‘of no use’ he dooms to extinction as
‘vermin’ or ‘ weeds.’
In mere weight of brain he is a long way above
those he most resembles. The gorilla’s brain is only
two-thirds that of the smallest human brain—in fact,
a man may have a brain three times as heavy as that
of the gorilla. The average human brain weighs just
under 50 ounces ; that of the gorilla does not exceed
20 ounces. The cranial capacity. is never less than
55 cubic inches in any normal man or woman, while
in the chimpanzee it is but 274 cubic inches, and in
the orang it is less. This preponderance of brain is
the one great anatomical distinction between him and
the brutes, whom he resembles in every bone and
muscle, nerve and blood-vessel, and from whom the
eighty vestigial structures in his muscular, skeletal, and
other systems—things obviously of no use to him and
only valuable as illustrations in hospital practice—
render it impossible to admit his physical separation.
26 MAMMALS
There are said to be two species of gorilla, one
brownish and blackish, the other having a yellow face
when young ; but only one is at present generally re-
cognised by zoologists, the n’jena of West Equatorial
Africa, from which came the nickname ‘Gena’ given to
the Crystal Palace specimen in which the Rev. J. G.
Wood was so much interested. The gorilla’s limbs
are much longer than those of a man, and he is the
biggest of the man-like group, and the only one ex-
cept man with anything like a calf to his leg. There
was a gorilla in Berlin which died of consumption in
1877, after fifteen months of captivity. On this animal
a good many observations were made, with the result
that he seemed to be of about the same standard of
intelligence as the more familiar chimpanzee. Some
.of his traits were peculiarly childish. On the voyage
home, when he felt a longing for sugar or fruit, which
was kept in the dining saloon, he would slip in there
when he thought no one was looking and go straight
to the cupboard, make a quick and dexterous snatch
at the sugar basin or fruit basket, and close the cup-
board door behind him before beginning to enjoy his
_ plunder, and if he were discovered he would cut and
run with his booty much as a naughty boy might do
with an apple, his whole behaviour making. it clear
that he was conscious of doing wrong. He also took
a special pleasure in making a noise by beating on
hollow things, and never missed an opportunity of
drumming on casks, dishes, or tin trays.
This habit of amusing himself has been de-
scribed by Dr. Garner as characteristic of the gorilla
in his native forests. One he describes as beating
ORANGUTAN O77,
with his hands ‘alternately, and with great rapidity,
and not unlike the manner in which the natives
beat a drum, except that each hand made the
same number of strokes, and the strokes were in a
constant series, rising and falling from very soft
to very loud, and wice versd; and a number of these
runs followed one another during the whole time that
the voicé continued. Between the first and second
strokes the interval was slightly longer than between
the second and third, and so on. As the beating
increased in loudness the intervals shortened in a
corresponding degree, whereas in the diminuendo the
intervals lengthened as the beating softened, and the
author of the sounds seemed conscious of this fact.
I could not, however, trace any relation in time or
harmony between the music and the beating, except
that they usually began at the same time and ended
at the same time ; but the voice suddenly stopped at
the very climax of the sounds, whereas the beating
was stopped at any part of the scale. I have no
doubt that the gorilla sometimes beats his breast, and
he has been seen to do so in captivity ; but I do
not think it follows that he is confined to that.’
There are at least three living species of orang,
all of them found in Sumatra and Borneo, the one
generally known to us being Szmda satyrus. Orang
is the Malay for ‘man, and wtan, which is com-
monly coupled with it, is merely the Malay for ‘ of
the woods. The orang is distinguished from the
gorilla and chimpanzee in being a reddish animal,
and he also has eight bones in his wrist instead of
seven. His arms are long, and his knees turn out-
28 MAMMALS
ward, so that he walks on the outside of his feet,
much as a boy does who treads his boots down. His
forehead is a high one, by no means so retreating as
in the gorillas and chimpanzees, and he has no ridges
to speak of over his eyes. His canine tecth are very
large, and, although he has twelve ribs like man, he
has only sixteen joints in his backbone. A. fossil
orang has been found in Northern India, and a close
ally, the Dryopithecus (which simply means ‘monkey
of the woods’), inhabited Western Europe in Miocene
times.
In Borneo the orang is generally known as the
mias, and under this name has been fully described
by Dr. A. R. Wallace. Dr. Wallace says that ‘he
walks deliberately along some of the larger branches
in the semi-erect attitude which the great length of
his arms and the shortness of his legs cause him
naturally to assume ; and the disproportion between
these limbs is increased by his walking on his
knuckles, not on the palm of the hand, as we should
do. Henever jumps or springs or seems to hurry him-
self, and yet manages to get along almost as quickly
as a person can run through the forest beneath,’
Like the gorilla and chimpanzee, he has the habit
of twisting together the smaller branches, so as to
make a platform on which to rest, and on one occa-
sion a large mias, which had not only been mortally
wounded, but had one of his arms broken by a rifle
bullet, succeeded in a wonderfully short time in con-
structing a platform which, besides concealing him
from sight, was strong enough to sustain the weight
of his heavy body after he was dead.
GIBBONS 29
Orangs have been known in captivity in Europe
for over a hundred years. In 1776 there was one
living in the menagerie of the Prince of Orange. All
the captive specimens have impressed their keepers
by their intelligence. Leuret gives a remarkable in-
stance of this. ‘One of the orangs,’ he says, ‘which
recently died at the menagerie, was accustomed, when
the dinner-hour had come, to open the door of the
room where he took his meals in company with
several persons. As he was not sufficiently tall to
reach as high as the key of the door, he hung on to
a rope, balanced himself, and, after a few oscillations,
very quickly reached the key. His keeper, who was
rather worried by so much exactitude, one day took
occasion to make three knots in the rope, which,
having thus been made too short, no longer permitted
the orang to seize the key. The animal, after an in-
effectual attempt, recognising the nature of the obstacle
which opposed his desire, climbed up the rope, placed
himself above the knots, and untied all three. The
same ape wishing to open a door, his keeper gave
_ him a bunch of fifteen keys; the ape tried them in
turn till he found the one he wanted. Another time
a bar of iron was put into his hands, and he made
use of it as a lever†Cuvier, too, had an orang which
used to drag a chair from one end of a room to the
other, in order to stand upon it so as to reach a latch
he desired to open.
The last genus of the Szmdide is that to which
the gibbons belong. These are the only apes, as
already mentioned, who habitually walk upright, and
keep their balance with their arms in any position,
30 MAMMALS
They inhabit the Malay Peninsula and its neighbour-
hood, and though in some respects very like man in
structure, they are in others rather closely allied to
the baboons. Their generic name, /7ylobates, means
‘tree-traveller,’ and in habits they are essentially
arboreal, living in large companies among the
branches, swinging through wonderful distances, and
indulging in loud and almost musical cries as they
leap along. ‘Among the branches, says the Rev.
J. G. Wood, ‘it would be as easy to catch a swallow
on the wing as the gibbon. The cry of the agile
gibbon is a very remarkable one, consisting of the
chromatic scale very rapidly rendered, and concluded
by a couple of barks, one an octave below the other.
One of these creatures, which was kept tame for
some time, was placed in a large room in which
branches were fixed at some distance from each other,
so as to represent the boughs of a tree. Eighteen
feet was the longest space between the branches,
and through this space she would launch herself,
uttering her chromatic cry, and catching, while in
mid-air, fruit or cake that was thrown to her.†One
of the gibbons at the Calcutta Zoological Gardens,
a hoolock, was in the habit of catching birds on the
wing that flew into his cage. There are several
species of gibbon, the best known being the siamang,
the lar or white-handed gibbon, the hoolock, with
the white frontal band, which is the only species
occurring in India, the agile gibbon, and the silver
gibbon. They have all been kept in confinement,
and many stories are told of their affectionate dis-
position. ‘I keep in my garden,’ says one writer, ‘a
ANECDOTE OF A GIBBON 3t
number of gibbons (Aylobates agilis). They live
quite’ free from all restraint in the trees, merely
coming when called to be fed. One of them, a young
male, on one occasion fell from a tree and dislocated
his wrist ; it received the greatest attention from the
others, especially from an old female, who, however,
was no relation. She used, before eating her own
plantains, to take up the first that were offered to her
every day and give them to the cripple, who was
living in the eaves of a wooden house; and I have
frequently noticed that a cry of fright, pain, or dis-
tress from one would bring all the others at once to
the complainer, and they would then condole with
him and fold him in their arms.’
But this sympathy is quite in accordance with
the character of all the Anthropoddea. In them, as
Romanes observes, ‘affection and sympathy are
strongly marked, the latter, indeed, more so than in
any other animals, not even excepting the dog’ It
is at least significant that the animals whose infancy
is prolonged—that is, with whom the mother’s care
lasts longest—are almost invariably the gentlest and
most intelligent ; for it is quite a mistake to suppose
that apes or monkeys are of inferior intelligence to
dogs, or elephants, or horses. By a confusion of
thought, docility is mistaken for intelligence, and
intelligence measured by the ease with which it can
be adapted to the service of man. The negro’s faith-
fulness as a slave is no testimony to the superiority
of his intellectual powers over those of the Arab or
the European.
Next to the Szmzidz, on the downward track,
32 MAMMALS
come what may be classed as the monkeys properly
so called, comprising the three families of the narrow-
nosed monkeys, confined to the Old World, the
broad-nosed monkeys, confined to America, and the —
marmosets, which are also exclusively American. Of
these three groups there are at least two hundred
species. Few people have a notion of the relative
importance of monkeys in the animal series, or of
their wide distribution in the present and the past.
Although there is now but one monkey in Europe,
Macacus inuus, the pithecus of Aristotle, otherwise
the Barbary macaque, more familiarly known as the
ape of the rock of Gibraltar, fossil remains of
macaques are found scattered all over the Continent,
and have even been unearthed as far north as Grays,
on the northern bank of the Thames. There is a
macaque (MZ. fuscatus) in Japan; and in the coldest
and least accessible forests of Eastern Tibet there is
a stump-tailed macaque (JZ. ¢2betanus) as well as the
Tibetan langur with the tip-tilted nose, which haunts
the forests between Moupin and Lake Khokonor,
where snow is on the ground for the greater portion
of the year. This langur (Semmnopithecus roxellane)
is one of the most historical of monkeys. In that
curious old Chinese book the Shan Hoc King, which
dates from something like 2205 B.c., there is a por-
trait of what is evidently a specimen of S. voxellana,
with the unmistakable turn-up nose that contrasts
so strikingly with the lengthy proboscis of Masalis
larvatus, the equally singular Bornean kahau. Mon-
keys, as a rule, are tropical animals; how they
BABOONS 33
manage to exist through the long, cold winters of the
Asiatic highlands is somewhat of a mystery.
There are monkeys all over America, from the Rio
Grande do Sul in 30° south latitude to Vera Cruz in
Mexico, where the black-handed spider species is
- found at an elevation of 2,000 feet on the slopes of
Orizaba, and of 4,000 feet in Oajaca. Using the
_term in its generally accepted sense, there are mon-
keys right across Asia, from the Hainan gibbon on
the east to the Arabian baboon on the west. This
_ Arabian baboon is better known on the other side
of the Red Sea as the sacred baboon of the old
_Egyptians, although it is now not found in -Egypt,
but further south in Abyssinia and the Soudan.
Sacred as it was, it would seem, at least occasionally,
to have been put to some use. On one of the old
bas-reliefs there is a fruit-bearing sycamore, in the
branches of which are three monkeys, easily recog-
nisable as Arabian baboons from their long snouts,
well-developed tails, and thickly haired shoulders and
necks ; on either side of the tree are two slaves, with
baskets laden with sycamore figs, and these baskets
they are filling with the figs handed down by the
baboons. It thus appears that the ancient Egyptians
had succeeded in training these animals to gather
fruits and hand them to their masters, precisely after
the fashion that the modern Malays are said to have
trained a langur in Sumatra to perform a similar
kind of ‘service, the fruit in the one case being
Sycamore figs and in the other cocoanuts. The
common long-tailed monkeys of the Egyptian sculp-
tures, it may be as well to note, were either guenons or
Cc
34 MAMMALS
mangabeys, probably guenons, which were well known
in Rome and Athens under the name of Cebus, which
now does duty as the generic designation of an
American family.
There are monkeys in many of the Asiatic islands.
In the Nicobars, as well as on the Arakan coast, there
is that remarkable animal the crab-eating macaque,
which has forsaken the usual simian food in favour
of a diet of crabs and insects, and frequents the tidal
creeks and rivers in family parties of half a dozen or
more, swimming and diving as readily asa man. In
Sumatra there are a large number of species; but
then, Sumatra is a haunt of the orang, and the special
home of the siamang, the largest of the long-armed
gibbons, whose morning and evening observances
attracted the attention of Duvaucel. ‘Siamangs,’ he
says, ‘generally assemble in numerous troops, con-
ducted, it is said, by a chief whom the Malays believe
to be invulnerable, probably because he is more agile,
powerful, and difficult to reach than the rest. Thus
united, they salute the rising and setting sun with
the most terrific cries, which may be heard at several
miles’ distance ; and which, when near, deafen when
they don’t frighten. This is the morning call to the
mountain Malays, but to the inhabitants of the towns
it is a most insupportable annoyance,’
In Java lives the wou-wou, or silver gibbon, its
congener the agile gibbon being found as far north
as the Sulu Islands, between the Philippines and
Borneo. In Borneo, monkey life is well represented,
from the orang downwards, and one species, Hose’s
langur, haunts the woods at elevations up to 4,000 feet
AFRICAN BABOONS 35
on the side of the chief mountain, Kina Balu. From
Celebes farther eastward, and from the small island
of Batchian more eastward still, comes the black ape,
which gives the connecting link between the macaques
and true baboons.
The true baboons are exclusively African, with
the exception of the Arabian species on the Red Sea
littoral. On the West Coast are the drill and man-
drill, the papio, and the anubis; on the East Coast,
and extending right across, is the yellow baboon ;
and in the south is the chacma, found in all the
mountain ranges of Cape Colony, living in droves of
thirty or more, even in the country about Simon’s
Bay and in the tract stretching down to Cape Point.
There are monkeys all over Africa, from the Somali-
land nisnas to the Senegambian patas, from the
Barbary macaque to the Cape vervet. Even 3,000
feet up the slopes of Kilima-njaro there is a guereza ;
and a fine fellow he is, with a long silky mantle and
a brush to his tail that would not disgrace a yak.
But that we know all the African species is very
unlikely ; for Africa has been but little worked as far
_ asits simian fauna is concerned. Sportsmen as a rule
care little for such troublesome things as monkeys.
The differences between the monkeys, strictly so
called, and the anthropoid apes are not so very great.
None of the anthropoids has a tail, but although the
monkeys generally have tails, their tails are of dif-
ferent lengths, and some have no tail at all. There
is one characteristic, however, which is worth noting,
and that is that no Old-World monkey hangs on
by his tail as some of the Americans do, There isa
C2
36 MAMMALS
certain difference in the breast-bone marking the
monkeys off from the anthropoids. In the monkeys
it is narrow and flattened from side to side, instead
of being broad and flattened from back to front.
All the monkeys, too, have eight bones in the wrist,
like the orang and the gibbons. Like the anthro-
poids, the Old-World monkeys have thirty-two teeth,
the ‘dental formula’—that is, the arrangement of
the teeth—being the same as in man, whereas the
-Americans have thirty-six teeth. The American
monkeys also differ from the rest in not having an
opposable thumb—a fact of little importance, but
worth remembering owing to the stress that was
once laid on the fact that civilised man had not an
opposable great toc.
The family of Old-World monkeys is known as
Cercopithecid@,which means‘monkeyswith tails’ (which
is not quite the case), and these are divided into
Cercopithecine, which have check-pouches, and the
legs and arms fairly equal, and Sesnopithecine (sacred
monkeys), which have no cheek-pouches, and have
the legs longer than the arms. The type of species
of the latter family is the sacred monkey of India
(Semnopithecus entellus), otherwise known as the
hanuman, which can be distinguished from the rest
of the group by his black feet and hands, his hair
sticking out over his brow like a pent-house, his tail,
like those of his nearest of kin, being longer than
his head and body put together. Hanuman, it may
be remembered, was the fabulous monkey who was
such friends with Vishnu in the expedition to Ceylon
to recover Sita from the giant Ravana, and he it was
LANGURS 37
who, during that war, bridged Palk Strait with the
rocks that his monkey troops threw into the sea. For
ages the hanuman monkeys have been considered
sacred by the Hindus, and allowed to amuse them-
selves at their own sweet will, much to man’s dis-
comfort ; but of late a check has been put to their
thefts and practical jokes, and they are no longer the
nuisances that they were. In the closely allied
Himalayan langur, the feet and hands are not so
black. Another langur is the negro monkey of Java,
which is black all over, except at the root of the tail
and below. The langurs are all Asiatic; in Africa
they are replaced by a somewhat similar genus, the
colobs, who, however, have no thumbs. Just as the
langurs have a black representative, so have the
colobs (Colobus satanas), who lives on the West
Equatorial coast. The handsomest of the colobine
monkeys are the guerezas, who live on the East
Coast.
One of the langurs—the banded-leaf monkey of
Malaysia—unlike the rest, has four tubercles in the
lower wisdom tooth, thereby resembling the next
group, the various species of Cercopithecus, which are
all African. The commonest of these are the greyish-
green South African vervet, with the blackish chin
and black-tipped tail; the olive-green North-East
African grivet, with the white chin and grey root to
the tail; and the West African green monkey, with
the yellowish whiskers. The next genus to Cerco-
pithecus is Cercocebus, comprising the white-eyelid
monkeys, or mangabeys, of which there are four
species, the most striking being C. fuliecnosus, the
38 MAMMALS
prettiest being C. collar¢s, with the white collar. . The
mangabeys all come from West Africa; they are
the most grimaceful of monkeys, and have a curious
habit of turning up their tail as they walk, as if they
were endeavouring to tickle their nose with it.
The macaques are Asiatic. They are heavier in
build than the mangabeys, and have much more pro-
jecting faces, though among them the nose is never
THE WHITE-COLLARED MANGABEY
as far forward as the mouth. Some of them have
long tails, some of them short tails; one of them has
no tail at all, the tail, for sorting purposes, being now
treated as a ‘negligeable quantity.’ They all re-
semble each other in gestures and voice, and appa-
rently have a rudimentary language. According to
Colonel Tickell, anger is generally silent amongst
them, ‘or, at most, expressed by a low hoarse ew, not
ae
ANECDOTE OF A BONNET-MONKEY 39
so gular or guttural as a growl; ennui and a desire
for company by a whining fom; invitation, depre-
cation, entreaty, by a smacking of the lips and a
display of the incisors into a regular broad grin,
accompanied with a subdued grunting chuckle, highly
expressive, but not to be rendered on paper; fear
and alarm by a loud, harsh shriek—&ra or kraouak
—which serves also as a warning to the others, who
may be heedless of danger.’ Unlike the langurs and
gibbons, they have no call.
Among the many macaques, we may mention the
bonnet-monkey (Macacus sinicus), so called from the
patch of blackish hair on the forehead, which is care-
fully parted in the middle. Mr. Wood describes one
of these animals he met with at the seaside, in charge
of the usual organ-man. ‘Apparently of its own
accord, the monkey had taught itself to imitate the
actions of the children who play on the sands, and
seemed to derive the keenest gratification from imi-
tating their proceedings. The owner allowed it to
roam about as much as it liked, and often it was the
centre of an admiring throng of children, who were
treating it as if it were a pet kitten, the owner all the
while contemplating the group with a broad grin on
his good-humoured countenance. I was first attracted
to the children by their shricks of laughter, which
were occasioned by the business-like way in which the
bonnet-monkey was washing a handkerchief in a little
pail of sea-water. In spite of the preternatural gravity
with which the monkey went through the operations
of washing, shaking, and hanging out to dry, it was
evident that the animal enjoyed the game as much as
40 MAMMALS
the children, and was always ready to wash any
handkerchief that was given him. I rather thought
that, monkey-like, he would have bitten or torn the
handkerchiefs ; but he never injured one of them,
treating them with as much respectful care as if he
were employed by a Chinese laundryman, who is a
model of self-contained gravity when engaged in
getting up linen,’
Closely allied to this species is the Singalese
rilawa, AZ. pileatus, which the Tamil conjurors teach
to dance, and carry from village to village clad in a
grotesque dress to amuse the people, in just the same
way as its relative amuses our children; but, as Mr.
Lydekker says, ‘the mimicry and amusing tricks of a
monkey in captivity are a mere shadow of what they
are in its native condition, so that persons who have
only seen these animals in confinement have but a
faint idea of their true nature. Another common
macaque is the rhesus, or bandar, carried about by the
jugglers in Northern India. The tailless macaque is
the Gibraltar ape, which crossed into Europe before
the straits were formed, and is also found in Morocco
and Algiers, being the only member of the genus
that is not Asiatic.
The series of intermediate forms leading through
the guenons, mangabeys and macaques to the baboons
is now practically complete. The baboons are an
ugly lot, easily distinguishable by their dog-like
heads, which have given them their generic name of
Cynocephalus (dog-headed). They are the biggest of
the monkeys, and have exceptionally big heads. One
of the best looking is the South African chacma,
THE CHACMA AI
otherwise the pig-like one, C: porcarius. The chacma
is not a foe to be despised. According to Mrs.
Martin, no vegetable poison has the slightest effect on
his iron constitution ; and, indeed, if there exists any
poison at all capable of killing him, it is quite certain
that, with his superior intelligence, he would be far
too artful to take it; and where the fiat for his de-
struction has gone forth, a well-organised attack has
to be made on him with dogs and guns. He can
show fight, too, and the dogs must be well trained
and have the safety of numbers to enable them to
face him ; for in fighting he has the immense advan-
tage of hands, with which he seizes a dog and holds
him fast while he inflicts a fatal bite through his
loins. Indeed, for either dog or man to come to close
quarters with Adonis (as the chacma is ironically
called by. the Boers) is no trifling matter. ‘One of
our friends, travelling on horseback, came upon a
number of baboons sitting in solemn parliament on
some rocks. He cantered towards them, anticipating
seeing the ungainly beasts take to their heels in
grotesque panic; but was somewhat taken aback on
finding that, far from being intimidated by his ap-
proach, they refused to move, and sat waiting for
him, regarding him the while with ominous calmness.
The canter subsided into a trot, and the trot into a
sedate walk, and still they sat there ; and so defiant
was the expression on each ugly face that at last the
intruder thought it wisest to turn back and ride igno-
miniously away.’
But the baboons have another side to their nature.
Not long ago there was at the Iondon Zoological
42 MAMMALS
Gardens, according to Dr. Romanes, an Arabian
baboon, C. kamadryas, and an Anubis baboon, C. -
anubts, confined in one cage, adjoining that which
contained another baboon. The Anubis baboon
passed its hand through the wires of the partition
in order to purloin a nut which the large baboon had
left within reach. The Anubis baboon very well
knew the danger he ran, for he waited until his bulky
neighbour had turned his back upon the nut with the
appearance of having forgotten all about it, and, of
course, pounced on the Anubis when temptation
proved too strong for caution, and bit him severely.
‘The Anubis baboon then retired to the middle of
the cage, moaning piteously, and holding his injured
hand against his chest while he rubbed it with the
other one. The Arabian baboon now approached him
from the top of the cage, and, while making a sooth-
ing sound very expressive of sympathy, folded the
sufferer in its arms—exactly as a mother would her
child under similar circumstances. It must be stated
also that this expression of sympathy had a decidedly
quieting effect upon the sufferer, his moans becoming
less piteous as soon as he was enfolded in the arms
of his comforter; and the manner in which he laid
his cheek upon the bosom of his friend was as expres-
sive as anything could be of sympathy appreciated.’
In the Cedide, the chief group of the American
monkeys, the nose is flat and has a broad inter-narial
septum, while the thumb, though not opposable, is
divergent from the fingers, except in the spider-
monkeys, in which it is rudimentary. All the
American monkeys live in the forests, ‘In this
THE WOOLLY SPIDERS 43
purely arboreal life, says Mr. Lydekker, ‘it will
easily be seen that the prehensile tail of those species
which possess such an organ must be of great assist-
ance to their owners in travelling from bough to
bough, and thus from tree to tree. Considering, how-
ever, that the species, like the titis, in which the tail
is not prehensile, are equally as arboreal in habits
as those with prehensile tails, it is quite clear that
the latter organ can only be regarded as a kind
of luxury. Indeed, the whole question as to the
reason why some monkeys have long tails, others
short tails, and others, again, no tails at all, is in-
volved in great obscurity.’
There are ten genera of the Cebide—the capu-
chins, Cebus (Cebus is.merely a derivative of the
Greek ebos, meaning a monkey); the - woolly
monkeys, Lagothrix; the woolly spider-monkeys,
Eriodes ; the spider-monkeys, A¢e/es ; the owl-faced
monkeys, Vyctipithecus ; the squirrel-monkeys, Chry-
Sothrix; the titis, Callthrix; the sakis, Pzthecza ;
the uakaris, Uacaria;,and the howlers. The capu-
chins have thickish tails, with no bare patch at the
end of the tail, where it is used for clinging to the
trees ; in fact, if the tail be looked upon as a third
hand, it is in this genus a hand without a palm. In
the woolly monkeys this patch is present, and con-
spicuous owing to the thickness of the fur everywhere
else. The woolly spiders connect them with the
spiders properly so-called. They are of much lighter
build, and have long, narrow tails and rudimentary
thumbs. The spiders live almost all their time in
the trees, but now and then they come to the ground
A4 MAMMALS
for a run, standing on their hind legs, holding their
arms up in the air, and bending their tails up into a
double curve. The owl-faced monkeys, or dourou-
colis, have very long tails, but the tails are not pre-
hensile ; neither are those of the squirrels, or saimaris,
and the titis, which are often classed together.
These monkeys are much smaller as a rule than any
of the preceding, and they vary very much in the
length of their tails. The sakis also do not have
prehensile tails; the uakaris have hardly any tail at
all, but the howlers have very long tails and these
are prehensile. On the tail alone they would be
classed next to the spiders ; but the expansion of the
hyoid bone, which particularly distinguishes them, is
so clearly foreshadowed among the titis and sakis
that these genera have to be placed between. This
bone, which joins on to the upper part of the wind-
pipe, is a most extraordinary-looking thing ; there are
some good specimens of it in the Kensington Natural
History Museum—bony bags as thin as paper and as
large as an ordinary wine-glass, a mouth-organ of
great capacity for the production of the exasperating
music which has given the genus the name of MMycetes,
or moaners.
The best known of the capuchins is perhaps the
brown one (C. fatuellus),a representative of which
was experimented on by Dr. Romanes, who published
the diary of the proceedings in his Amdmal Intelli-
gence. We must find room for an extract from this
most interesting record. ‘To-day he obtained posses-
sion of a hearth-brush, one of the kind which has the
handle screwed into the brush. He soon found the
THE RED-FACED SPIDER MONKEY
46 MAMMALS
way to unscrew the handle, and having done that, he
immediately began to try to find out the way to
screw it in again. This he in time accomplished.
At first he put the wrong end of the handle into the
hole, but turned it round and round the right way for
screwing. Finding it did not hold, he turned the
other end of the handle and carefully stuck it into
the hole, and began again to turn it the right way.
It was of course a very difficult feat for him to per-
form, for he required both his hands to hold the
handle in the proper position, and to turn it between
his hands in order to screw it in, and the long bristles
of the brush prevented it from remaining steady or
with the right side up. He held the brush with his
hind hand, but even then it was very difficult for him
to get the first screw to fit into the thread. He
worked at it, however, with the most unwearying per-
severance until he got the first turn of the screw to
catch, and he then quickly turned it round and round
until it was screwed up to the end. The most re-
markable thing was that, however often he was dis-
appointed in the beginning, he never was induced to
try turning the handle the wrong way; he always
screwed it from right to left. As soon as he had
accomplished his wish he unscrewed it again, and
then screwed it in again, —and amused himself till he
was tired. ‘The desire to accomplish a chosen task,’
continues the diarist, ‘seems a sufficient inducement
to lead him to take any amount of trouble. This
seems a very human feeling, such as is not shown, I
believe, by any othet animal. It is not the desire of
praise, as he never notices people looking on; it is
MARMOSETS 47
simply the desire to achieve an object for the sake of
achieving an object, and he never rests nor allows his
attention to be distracted until it is done. This
monkey also found out how to open boxes with keys,
and did other noteworthy things. His rapidity of
discernment was very striking. When he went back
to the Zoological Gardens he always instantly re-
cognised the friends among whom he had spent his
holiday. ‘I purposely, says the doctor, ‘visited the
monkey-house on Easter Monday, in order to see
whether he would pick me out of the solid mass of
people who fill the place on that day. Although I
could only obtain a place three or four rows back
from the cage, and although I made no sound where-
with to attract his attention, he saw me almost im-
mediately, and with a sudden intelligent look of
recognition ran across the cage to greet me. When
I went away he followed me, as he always did,
to the extreme end of his cage, and stood there
watching my departure as long as I remained in
sight,’
The last and the smallest of the man-like animals
are the Hapalide or marmosets. Unlike the other
American monkeys, these have the same number of
teeth as man, although the arrangement is different,
there being three premolars and two molars, instead
of two premolars and three molars. Like all the rest
of the order, they have two incisors and one canine.
Of course we have taken it as generally known that
the dental formula of man is 2, 1, 2, 3, the first three
figures, the important ones, being easily rememberable
as giving the boiling-point of water. The tail of the
48 MAMMALS
marmosets is long, hairy, and non-prehensile; the
thumb is long but not opposable, and the great toe
is rudimentary, all the fingers and toes being furnished
with pointed claws instead of the flat nails possessed
by all other monkeys. Another noteworthy point is
that the marmosets usually have three young ones at
a birth, while the rest of the monkeys have but one ;
but amongst them, as among all the others, a
youngster that loses its parents is always adopted
and brought up by some other family. There are
two genera of marmosets, those with short canine
teeth being assigned to Hapale, while those in which
the canines are longer than the incisors are assigned
to Midas. It is to Midas that those pretty creatures
the silky marmosets belong.
LEMUROIDEA.—Our next group is mainly
represented in Madagascar, though its distribution
extends between the tropics all the way from the
Philippines and Celebes to the West Coast of Africa.
In its living representatives it is so closely allied to
the monkeys that it is occasionally classed with them ;
in one form it is allied to the rodents, while in its
fossil forms it has obvious affinities not only with the
insectivores but with the ungulates. In Madagascar
it comprises quite half the mammalian fauna. All
of its representatives are arboreal, many of them are
nocturnal, and from their nocturnal habits they have
received the name of Lemuroids, demur being the
Latin for ‘ghost’ or ‘hobgoblin,’
The largest of the group is the indri, found on
the cast side of Madagascar. The sifakas belong to
MARMOSETS
50 MAMMALS
another genus (Propithecus) and are all curiously local
and limited, each distinct species being characteristic
of a distinct area. The avahis or woolly lemurs,
unlike the indris and sifakas, are found either
THE BROWN MOUSE-LEMUR
solitary or in pairs. The true lemurs have more
teeth than the others; the gentle lemur belongs to
a different genus (Hapalemur) distinguishable by the
more rounded head and shorter muzzle; the weasel-
LEMURS 51
lemurs have either no upper front incisors at all or
only rudimentary ones; the mouse-lemurs are
hardly larger than rats, and are remarkable for re-
maining dormant during the hottest period of the
year. The brown mouse-lemur (of which we give
the portrait) was brought to England by Mr. Shaw,
the well-known missionary. The dwarf mouse-lemur
is the animal Buffon described as the rat of Mada-
gascar ; it builds nests of twigs as if it were a rook,
and lines them with hair. The galagos are found
on the African mainland; the large size of their
ears sufficiently distinguishes them ; they are found
practically all over Africa, and have been known for
the last hundred years. The two genera Wycticebus
and Lords are Asiatic; Perodicticus, which includes
the potto and awantibo, is exclusively African. In
earlier times the group hada much wider distribution,
fossil representatives having been found not only in
England and France but in North America. There
are two other families of the lemuroids besides the
Lemuride. These are the Zarsizde and the Chiro-
myid@, each represented by a single genus and a
single species.
The Tarsier derives its name from the frog-like
elongation of its ankle bones. In his Crudse of the
Marchesa, Dr. Guillemard says of one obtained at
Celebes :—‘ The most interesting addition to our mena-
gerie was a tiny lemuroid animal, brought to us by a
native, by whom it was said to have been caught upon
the mainland. These little creatures, which are of
arboreal and nocturnal habits, are about the size of a
small rat, and are covered with a remarkably thick fur,
D2
eo MAMMALS
which is very soft. The tail is long, and covered with
hair at the root and tip, while the middle portion of it is
nearly bare. The eyes are enormous, and, indeed, seem,
together with the equally large ears, to constitute the
greater part of the face, for the jaw and nose are very
small, and the latter is set in, like that of a pug dog,
almost at a right angle. The hind-limb at once
attracts attention from the great length of the tarsal
bones, and the hand is equally noticeable for its
length, the curious claws with which it is provided,
and the extraordinary disc-shaped palps on the
palmar surface of the fingers, which probably enable
the animal to retain its hold in almost any position. °
This weird-looking creature we were unable to keep
long in captivity, for we could not get it to eat the
cockroaches which were almost the only food with
which we could supply it. It remained still by day
in its darkened cage, but at night, especially if dis-
turbed, it would spring vertically upwards in an odd
mechanical manner, not unlike the hopping of a
flea. On the third day it found a grave in a pickle-
bottle.’
The aye-aye is quite as curious, with its rodent-
like incisors, its absence of tusks, and its attenuated
middle claw, with which it extracts from their
burrows the larve which are its natural food. In
appearance it is not unlike a cat with a large bushy
tail and rounded ears. ‘It is no wonder, says Mr.
Shaw, ‘that in connection with so curious an animal
a number of superstitious beliefs should be current
among the Betsimisaraka, in whose country the aye-
aye is principally found. In reference to its name,
THE AYE-AYE 53
one account says that the first discoverers took it
from one part of the island to another, the inhabi-
tants of which had never seen it, and in their surprise
they exclaimed “Hay! Hay!†Another tale is that,
many years ago, some Betsimisaraka had occasion to
open an old tomb, in which had been buried one of
their ancestors. No sooner was the tomb opened
than this animal, into which the said ancestor had
developed, sprang out, and hence the exclamation of
surprise that has attached itself as a name to this
creature. Many of the Betsimisaraka still believe
that the aye-aye is the embodiment of their fore-
fathers, and hence will not touch it, much less do it
any injury. It is said that, when one is discovered
dead in the forest, these people make a tomb for
it and bury it with all the formality of a funeral.
The superstition extends even to the nest which the
animal makes for itself If a man receives from
another, or picks up accidentally, the portion on
which the head of the aye-aye has rested, it is sure
to bring good fortune ; while the receiving of that
part on which its feet rested is followed by bad luck
or death. This has passed into a proverb among the
Betsimisaraka.’
In connection with this local ancestral theory, it
is a strange coincidence that naturalists are all agreed
in looking upon the aye-aye as the very last animal
that can be classified as man-like. It is the last of
the lemuroids, which some with good reason group
in one order with the anthropoids under the designa-
tion of Primates.
54 MAMMALS
CHIROPTERA.—In the zoological series the
next order is that of the bats, or Chzroptera, the
hand-winged mammals, the only mammals that have
the power of true flight. The hands and arms are
large in proportion to the rest of the frame, and very
light in structure, the bones being remarkably hollow
and long and slender. Were those of a man to be in
the same proportion, his fathom—that is, the distance
he can stretch from finger-tip to finger-tip—would
measure thirty feet instead of six. The wing is an
expansion of the skin, stretching generally from the
shoulder along the arms and fingers, and so down to
the hind legs or the tail. The thumb is always free,
and carries the claw by which the bat climbs ; the
toes are always free, and are all clawed. The most
peculiar thing in the skeleton is the knee-joint, which
is turned backwards like the. elbow, so that a bat
cannot walk readily, and rarely settles on the ground.
Another point worth notice is the weakness of the
hip-girdle compared with that of the shoulders, whose
strength bears eloquent witness to the immense power
necessary for sustained flight. No mammal has so
highly developed a skin as a bat ; it is so richly pro-
vided with nerve filaments that the sense of touch
must be many times greater than that of any other
vertebrate. As a matter of fact, a bat deprived
of sight and smell and hearing has been found
capable of flying easily about a room without knock-
ing against a maze of silken threads, which had been
stretched across it so as to leave spaces only just
large enough for his open wings to pass. This power
of discovering the proximity of objects without sce-
SKELETON OF BAT
66 MAMMALS
ing them, hearing them, or touching them, as we
understand the meaning of touch, seems to be chiefly
concentrated in the wing membranes, in the ears, and
in the so-called ‘leaf’ that looks like a mask on the
face, and serves the same purpose as a cat’s whiskers.
Bats are not blind; on the contrary, their eyes are
remarkably bright and intelligent.
The naturalist, rather curiously, divides his bats
into large ones and small ones, the large ones being
all fruit-eaters and all natives of the eastern hemi-
sphere. These can be readily distinguished from the
others owing to their having always three joints in
the second finger, and generally a claw on that finger
as well as the claw on the thumb. The other bats
never have the extra claw, and have either one or
two joints in the finger. Another distinction is that
the molar teeth of the fruit-bats have smooth crowns,
with a longitudinal groove, while the molars of the
others have cusped crowns and cross grooves. It is
also stated that, when a fruit-bat goes to sleep, he
hangs himself up by one leg, while all the other bats
hang themselves up by two; but as there are four
hundred and fifty species of bats altogether, it is
probable that this is a rule not without exceptions.
Fruit-bats, or fox-bats, as they are sometimes
called, are found in enormous numbers in India,
Australia, and the Polynesian Islands, some of the
species feeding quite as much on flowers as on fruit.
Many of them migrate, as birds do, and return to the
same spots year after year, as their food becomes fit
for them. All these bats, which are also known as
flying foxes, have no tails, and belong to the genus
THE COLLARED FRUIT-BAT AND YOUNG
58 MAMMALS
Pteropus. The fox-bats, with short tails and short
fur on the back of the neck, are assigned to another
genus, Xantharpyza. In the accompanying illustra-
tion we have a representative of YY. collaris, the
collared fox-bat, which is interesting as showing the
way in which such animals carry their young. There
are collared bats living in the great pyramid of
Cheops, others in the old buildings of Palestine, and
one species has its home in the rocksalt caves of
Kishm Island in the Persian Gulf.
The general colouration of the fruit-bats is black
and tan. Some of them are anything but prepos-
sessing in appearance. For instance, there is a
‘hammer-headed’ bat in the Gaboon country which
has a head like an ugly old horse, and there is a
genus of ‘tube-nosed bats’ in the neighbourhood of
Torres Straits the species of which look like Japanese
monsters made up for show purposes. On the other
hand, some are really handsome. In the Solomon
Totunds there is one, a long-tongued fruit-bat, Veso-
nycterts Woodford:, which has a bright orange body
and dark brown wings. Another interesting bat in the
Solomon Islands is the cusped-toothed one, in which
the teeth have cusps that almost obliterate the longi-
tudinal grooves, thus giving the transition form
between the two sub-orders which zoologists have
set up.
The insectivorous bats are much more numerous
than the others, there being no less than five families
of them. Among those most worthy of notice are
the horse-shoes with nose-leaves and no inner ear or
tragus, as it is called, but a membrane in front, which
BATS 59
is known as the anti-tragus. Two of these bats—the
large one, Rhinolophus ferrum-equinum, and the lesser
one, R. hipposiderus—are found in Britain. Another
family, the Mycteride, have large ears, a large tragus,
and a small nose leaf; to this family belongs the false
vampire of India, Megaderma lyra, and the Queens-
land form, MZ. gigas, which it is as difficult to look
upon as a ‘small’ bat as it is to consider Carponycteris
minimus asa ‘large’ one. The genus Wycteris, which
gives its name to the family,
is mainly an African one.
The next family, Vesper-
tiliontde, includes all the
British species except the
two horse-shoes. They all
have a tragus, but no nose-
leaf, and they all have
a longish tail, to the tip
of which the membrane
stretches. The long-ear,
Plecotus aurttus, may be
taken as the representative of its genus. It may be
recognised by its long ears and the grooves on the
muzzle behind the nostrils. The ears are as mobile
as those of a dog, and are not only moved backwards
and forwards, but thrown into graceful folds during
the act of listening, these folds being formed by three
slight gristly rays that run from the base of the ear
to the edge. This bat, which has a wing-spread of
about ten inches, is found as far west as Ireland and
as far east as the Himalaya, and all through Europe
and North Africa, Like the other British species, it
HEAD OF LONG-EARED BAT
LONG-EARED BATS
THE LONG-EARED BAT 61
hibernates—that is to say, enters into a state of torpor
through the winter, when there are no insects to eat,
suspending its respiration and digestion, and slowing
LONG-EARED BAT SLEEPING
its pulsation until its heart beats but once a second
instead of at the normal furious rate.
The long-ear does not come out until very late in
the evening ; the barbastelle, Syzotus barbastellus,is a
much earlier riser. This is a blacker bat than the other,
62 MAMMALS
though white and piebald specimens are on record,
and it has its muzzle apparently cut off short, with
a groove on each side leading up to the nostrils.
It is somewhat clumsy looking, and in its flight seems
to take matters much more easily than that commonest
of British bats, the pipistrelle, Vesperugo pzpistrellus,
BARBASTELLE BAT WALKING
which is out every evening from March to December,
swift and busy, with long curving swoops and rapid
twists and turns, as if it had not a minute to lose. A
larger bat, and a more powerful one, is the noctule,
belonging to the same genus ; he is the great beetle-
catcher, ‘essentially adapted,’ says Bell, ‘for the cap-
VAMPIRE BAT 63
ture and mastication of coleopterous insects, and he
flies high and straight, with a’dash at every luckless
cockchafer that may come sailing near him.
Another important family of bats is the Em-
ballonuride, of which there is only one European spe-
cies) Among the more remarkable members of this
group are the white bats, belonging to the genus Dz-
HEAD OF VAMPIRE BAT
clidurus, found in Central and South America; the
naked bat of Malaysia, which has a pouch for holding
the young while they are suckling ; the New Zealand
bat, which not only catches insects as it flies, but as it
creeps among the trees; and the vampires of South
America, of which the only blood-suckers are Desmo-
dus rufus and Diphylla ecaudata, In the Kensington
64 MAMMALS
Natural History Museum there is a specimen of Des-
modus, which Darwin saw caught in the act of sucking
blood from a horse. Regarding its capture he says:
«The vampire bat is often the cause of much trouble
by biting the horses on their withers. The injury is
generally not so much owing to the loss of blood as
to the inflammation which the pressure of the saddle
afterwards produces. The whole circumstance has
lately been doubted in England; I was, therefore,
fortunate in being present when one was actually
caught on a horse’s back. We were bivouacking late
one evening near Coquimbo, in Chili, when my ser-
vant, noticing that one of the horses was very restive,
went to see what was the matter, and fancying he
could distinguish something, suddenly put his hand
on the beast’s withers, and secured the vampire. In
the morning the spot where the bite had been inflicted
was easily distinguished from being slightly swollen
and bloody.’
INSECTIVORA.—The bats are a special order
of greatly modified insectivores, one of the transition
stages being, perhaps, suggested in the Malaysian
cobegos, who have not the power of true flight, but,
like the flying squirrels and flying lizards, have an
extension of membrane, which enables them to take
exceedingly long leaps from tree to tree. Their
genus is Galeopithecus, and there are two species.
The insectivores are a very miscellaneous order.
Though similar in structure, they differ very much in
their food. Instead of living entirely on insects, as
one would suppose from their name, some of them eat
WATER SHREWS
66 MAMMALS
leaves as well; some of them, like the mole, eat
worms ; one of them, the potamogale, feeds on fish,
and, unlike the rest of the order, has no collar-bones.
Most of them have soft fur; but one genus, that
containing the hedge-hogs, has a spiny coat, and
another (Cenéetes), which includes the Madagascar
ground-hog, is more or less spiny. There are some two
hundred species altogether, the most numerous being
the various kinds of shrews. Among these are the
tree-shrews ( 7upazide@), that are like squirrels, both in
habit and appearance ; the jumping shrews (Macro-
scelide), long-nosed and long-legged, which hop about
like tiny kangaroos ; the true shrews (Sordcide), which
are often mistaken for mice, but differ markedly from
them in their sickle-shaped incisor teeth. There are
many kinds of shrews —earless shrews, water shrews,
musk shrews, burrowing shrews, swimming shrews,
web-footed shrews, and mole shrews, which last,
however, belong to a different family, the Zalpidz,
which includes the desmans and the moles. The
mole extends from England to Japan, and fossil
moles have been found in the rocks all the way down
to the Lower Miocene. The mole has rudimentary
eyes, but no external ears; its fur is like velvet, set
vertically on the skin, so that it can pass backwards
or forwards along its burrow with equal ease. Its
shoulder-girdle is even more powerful than that of
the bats, and the humerus bears a number of ridges
for the attachment of the muscles that make it easily
distinguishable from that of any other mammal. It
has been said that the mole is as happy as a skylark,
Assuredly his frame is as marvellously adapted for
CARNIVORA 67
the conditions of his existence and the work he has
to do.
CARNIVORA.—The order of carnivores is
another old group which must not have its name
taken too literally. It does not include all the flesh-
eaters ; and some of its members, notably among the
bears, are practically vegetarians. Speaking gene-
rally, however, the name is appropriate, for most of
the species prey on other animals and live on warm
flesh. In structure there is a great resemblance
among them all. Their lower jaw can only move
vertically, owing to the projecting process or condyle
being semi-cylindrical, and working in a deep
narrow, glenoid ‘ fossa’—or hollow—of corresponding
form. Like the potamogale, but unlike the rest of the
insectivores, their collar-bones are either absent or
represented by little splints embedded in the
muscles. Unlike, too, the majority of the insecti-
vores, the bones of the forearm are distinct, and
the fibula in the lower leg slender, though it is
always separated from the tibia. The wrist-bones,
too, are peculiar in having the lunar and scaphoid
all in one, and no central bone; and with regard to
this, it may be as well to explain that in the typical
wrist there are eight bones—(1) the scaphoid, so called
from its boat-shaped socket ; (2) the lunar, so called
from its crescent shape, both of these being in con-
nection with the radius ; (3) the cuneiform, or wedge-
shaped bone, connected by a ligament with the ulna;
and (4) the pisiform, or pea-shaped bone, developed in
the tendon and gliding over in front of the cunei-
E2
68 MAMMALS
form; next to the fingers come (5) the trapezium,
(6) the trapezoid, (7) the magnum, and (8) the
unciform, or hook-shaped bone, the ninth, or central
bone, to which we have more than once alluded,
coming between the first and second rows.
The carnivores are divided into three groups—
fissipeds, pinnipeds, and creodonts—the first being
mostly land animals, of about 300 species ; the
second water animals, of about 50 species ; and the
third being as yet only found fossil. The fissipeds
are at once distinguishable from the others by their
having flesh-teeth, or carnassials—that is to say, a
back tooth on each side of both jaws specially modi-
fied to suit their carnivorous diet. There are three
groups of these land carnivores, which we may call
the cats, the dogs, and the bears, or, to use the tech-
nical and less misleading terms, the 4/urozdea, the
Cynoidea, and the Arctotdea. To the first of these
belong all the Fedde, large and small, lions, tigers,
leopards, pumas, lynxes, and what not; the Vzver-
vide, or civets, and mongooses ; the Proteleida, with
one representative, the aard-wolf; and the Hyenide.
The Cynoidea are really the dog family (Canzde),
including the wolves and foxes. The Arctotdea
include the Uvrstde, or bears; the Procyonide@, or
raccoons; and the Mustelide, or otters, badgers and
weasels.
None of the carnivores have less than four toes
on each foot. The dogs have five toes in front and
four behind; but on the fore feet the thumb is so
short as not to reach the ground, and on the hind
foot there is occasionally a ‘dew-claw,’ which is
SKELETON OF A LION
70 MAMMALS
merely the rudimentary great toe. The bears have
five toes on each foot. The cats have their toes
padded and clawed, the claws being what is known
as ‘retractile’—that is, held back by an elastic liga-
ment in such a way as to be kept off the ground in
the act of walking, or at will, and at the same time
being instantly protrusible by stretching the fingers,
or toes, as the case may be. None of the dogs have
retractile claws, nor are any of their claws very
sharp. When an animal walks on its toes it is said
to be ‘digitigrade,; when on its sole it is ‘ planti-
grade.’ The cats and dogs are usually classed as
digitigrade, the bears as plantigrade and sub-planti-
grade; but it is as well not to insist on this too
closely. The typical cat has thirty teeth, the formula
being 3, I, 3, 1 for the top jaw, and 3,1,2,1 for the other ;
the typical dog, like the typical bear, has forty-two
teeth, the dental formula being 3, I, 4, 2 for the top
jaw, and 3, 1, 4,3 for the other. But some cats have
only twenty-eight teeth, and one of the dogs
(Lalande’s) has forty-eight, being no less than four
molars in each half-jaw, a dentition which no other
mammal has that is not a marsupial.
In any notice of the Fede it is customary to
begin with the lion. He certainly looks more like a
‘king of the beasts’ than the tiger, and, as a rule,
holds himself more royally. His mane has a good
deal to do with this, perhaps, but in the wild state he
does not grow to the same extent as when he is in
captivity, and altogether he is much more wiry in
build than artists have figured him. He is now only
found in Asia and Africa, slowly decreasing in num-
LIONS
V2 MAMMALS
bers under the persistent attacks of the hunter and the
gradual spread of cultivation. Forty years ago lions
were so numerous: in the Delhi district that one
sportsman, Colonel Acland Smith, killed fifty of
them ; nowadays they are becoming so rare that in
Kattywar they are being preserved as if they were
partridges. Between the Tigris and the Euphrates
they are still fairly plentiful, and they used to range
into Palestine and Asia Minor, and even, according
to Herodotus, into Thrace and Macedonia, while a
species, Felzs spele@a, so closely allied to / deo as to
be almost indistinguishable from it, roamed in Pre-
Glacial days all over Western Europe, and even into
what is now Britain.
Lions are to be met with all over Africa, but few
are now killed south of the Orange River. In
Mashonaland they still abound. Lord Randolph
Churchill on one occasion saw seven of them at once,
‘trooping and trotting along ahead of us like a lot of
enormous dogs—great yellow objects, offering such a
sight as I had never dreamed of. In Damaraland
Galton ‘at one place put up eight lions; they were
not close together, but within a space about two
hundred yards across, through which we happened to -
drive. It was the largest pack I had seen. Fourteen
is the largest I have ever heard of.’
Lions are not nearly so dangerous to man as is gene-
rally supposed. The last-mentioned explorer remarks
that, at a rendezvous with the natives, he was curious
to know what animals were most fatal to man in that
country. ‘We counted over all the deaths that we
could think of. Buffaloes (though not common here)
AN ADVENTURE WITH LIONS ; 73
killed the most, then rhinoceroses, and, lastly, lions.
Areep, the predecessor of Cornelius as chief of his
tribe, was killed by a black rhinoceros. It is curious
how many people are wounded by lions, though not
killed. A very active Damara, who was some time
with me in Damaraland, but who stayed behind as I
journeyed up country, was in a dreadfully mangled
state when I returned. He had found a lion in the
act of striking down his ox, and rushed at him with
his assegai ; he gave him a wound that must have
proved mortal, for the assegai went far into his side,
but the lion turned upon him, and seizing him, bit
one elbow-joint quite through, and continued worry-
ing him until some other Damaras ran up and killed
the animal. My servant, Hans, had a very narrow
escape some time since. He was riding old Friesch-
land (the most useful ox I had, but now worn out by
the Ondonga journey) along the Swakop, when he
saw something dusky by the side of a camelthorn
tree, two hundred yards off. This was a lion, that
rose and walked towards him. Hans had his gun
in his gun-bag by the side of his saddle, and rode on,
for there is no use in provoking hostilities single-
handed with a lion, unless some object has to be
gained by it. As every sportsman at last acknow-
ledges, the coolest hand and the best shot are never
safe, for a bullet, however well aimed, is not certain to
put the animal hors de combat. After the lion had
walked some twenty or thirty-yards, Frieschland, the
ox, either saw or smelt him, and became furious.
Hans had enough to do to keep his seat, for a power-
ful long-horned ox tossing his head about and plung-
74 MAMMALS
ing wildly is a most awkward back for the best of
jockeys. The lion galloped up. He and Hans were
side by side. The lion made his spring, and one heavy
paw came on the nape of the ox’s neck, and rolled
him over ; the other clutched at Hans’s arm, and tore
the sleeve of his shirt to ribbons, but did not wound
him, and there they all three lay. Hans, though he
was thrown upon his gun, contrived to wriggle it out,
the lion snarling and clutching at him all the time;
but for all that, he put both bullets into the beast’s
body, who dropped, then turned round, and limped
bleeding away into. the recesses of a broad, thick
cover ; and, of course, Hans, shaken as he was, let him
go. There were no dogs to follow him, so he was
allowed to die in peace, and subsequently his spoor
was taken up, and his remains found.’
Lions loom large when seen by the excited ex-
plorer in the dusk of the evening, but they dwindle
considerably when alongside the measuring tape. Mr.
Selous gives ten feet as the length of his largest
African lion, and from this we must deduct nearly
a yard for the tail. Indian specimens recently
measured are rather smaller, so that we shall not be
far wrong in taking the lion as under four feet in
height and about six feet in length, exclusive of his
tail—that wonderful tail which has at its tip the tuft
that surrounds the horny nail, known in fact and
fiction as the thorn with which the king of beasts
goads himself to anger.
The lioness is about a foot shorter than the male
over all—at the longest nine feet—and stands propor-
tionally lower. She has no mane, and when very
LIONESS AND CUBS
76 MAMMALS
young is marked with stripes and spots, just as the
males are, but more conspicuously. From their
general sandy colour it is obvious that lions are not
dwellers in forest districts, but in open sandy plains.
As a rule, they sleep during the day and prowl at
night, when their deep bass roar dominates every
other sound. A lion, however, has three roars—one
a sort of challenge; another, in quite a different key,
betraying his regret at being baulked of his prey ;
and a third a menagerie roar, which is by no means
alarming.
Sir Samuel Baker’s description of the challeng-
ing roar is perhaps the best: ‘There is nothing
so beautiful or enjoyable to my ears as the roar
of a lion on a still night, when everything is calm,
and no sound disturbs the solitude except the
awe-inspiring notes, like the rumble of distant
thunder, as they die away into the deepest bass.
The first few notes resemble the bellow of a bull ;
these are repeated in slow succession four or five
times, after which the voice is sunk into a lower key,
and a number of quick, short roars are at length
followed by rapid coughing notes, so deep and power-
ful that they seem to vibrate through the earth.’
The tiger (F. ¢igris) differs from the lion in the
absence of the mane and in the general colouration.
Tigers are boldly striped, as a rule, but white tigers,
and even black tigers, are on record; and the Chinese
tiger, instead of having a short velvety coat, is almost
as furry asa bear. The tiger is a splendid cat, quite
as long as the lion, though not so high on the legs ;
and he is the only cat with black cross stripes on his
‘THE TIGER 77
body, a pattern which makes him almost invisible
among the reeds of the jungle and in the shadows of
the forest.
The ground colour of this coat varies con-
siderably ; it is brightest when young. Among the
males it begins to fade as soon as the ruff grows
thick round the throat—the ruff which represents the
lion’s mane. It is yellowest in the Indian jungles ;
it is reddest in the forests of the north. For the tiger
still lives north of Lake Baikal, and in Amurland
and Saghalien ; westward, his present limit seems to
be the Caucasus; eastward, he is at home in Sumatra,
Java, and Bali, though he does not appear to reach
Borneo, nor does he cross Palk Strait from India
into Ceylon.
Fossil tigers have been found in the New Siberian
Islands in the Arctic Sea; in fact, the tiger never
was an animal peculiar to the tropics, and there are
good reasons for supposing that it is only within a
comparatively late period that his range has extended
as far south as India, where he keeps himself per-
sistently in the shade, and wallows constantly in the
mud during the burning heat of the dry season.
Like the lion, he is gradually being driven out by
the sportsman and the cultivator, and in many places
his haunts are confined to the islands in the rivers.
He is never as bold in look as the lion so often is,
but goes slouching and slinking along like a true
cat; and even in attack he seldom takes his hind
legs off the ground, but rushes instead of springing
at his prey. He makes for the nape of the victim’s
neck, and his ‘kill’ can always be recognised by his
78 MAMMALS
beginning to feed on it at its hind quarters, while the
leopard begins at the shoulders.
The leopard (/. pardus) is recognisable at once
by his spots. He comes next in size to the lion and
tiger, and, unlike them, he can climb a tree. He is
found all over Africa, and in Asia ranges from Pales-
LEOPARDS
tine to Manchuria, and southwards of that line into
India and. Malaysia. Like the tiger, his coat is more
woolly in the colder climates, and its colour varies
according to his haunts. Occasionally he is almost
black ; but just as the ordinary black cat shows the
tabby stripes when seen in a good light, so does the
THE JAGUAR 79
black leopard his rings and rosettes. At one time some
of his varieties were called panthers, but there are no
panthers nowadays. Structurally there was no differ-
ence between the varieties, and the discovery of the
complete series of intermediate coat patterns proved
that panther and leopard were identical.
The ounce, or snow-leopard (F. uucza), is a Central
Asian species, ranging north and south of the Altai
Mountains, and rarely below the snow-line. It is a
whitish animal with black rings about the size of a
crown piece, the fur being very long and not unlike
that of a Persian cat. The leopard has been measured
to reach eight feet in length; the snow-leopard has
not been known to exceed seven feet six inches. Like
the puma, it is said never to attack man except in
self-defence.
The leopards have their spots arranged apparently
at random. The jaguar (F. onca) has his in fairly
well-marked rows, and they are larger. As there are
black leopards, so there are black jaguars, and the
ground colour of his coat also varies from yellow to
nearly a tan.
The jaguar is an American animal, ranging
from Texas to Patagonia, and is so good a climber
‘that in some districts he becomes almost entirely
arboreal, and feeds on the monkeys and other in-
habitants of the trees. In other parts the jaguar
becomes almost a fishing-cat, and has been watched
standing in the shallow bend of a river, knocking out
the fish with the lightning stroke of his powerful
paw. In other places he devotes his attention to
turtle, tearing the upper shell from the lower at a
80 MAMMALS.
single pull, and making but a mouthful or two of the
contents. He is a big handsome fellow, over six feet
long, tail and all, and is as often killed with the lasso
or bolas as with dogs and poisoned arrows. He is
notoriously noisy, roaring much by night, and espe-
cially before bad weather.
A significant habit on the part of the jaguar
is noticed by Darwin: ‘One day, when hunting
on the banks of the Uruguay, I was shown certain
trees to which these animals constantly recur for the
purpose, as it is said, of sharpening their claws. I
saw three well-known trees; in front the bark was
worn smooth, as if by the breast of the animal, and
on each side there were deep scratches, or rather
grooves, extending in an oblique line, nearly a yard
in length. The scars were of different ages. A
common method of ascertaining whether a jaguar is
in the neighbourhood is to examine these trees. I
imagine this habit of the jaguar is exactly similar to
one which may any day be seen in the common cat,
as, with outstretched legs and exserted claws, it
scrapes the leg of a chair; and I have heard of
young fruit-trees in an orchard in England having
been thus much injured. Some such habit must also
be common to the puma, for on the bare, hard soil of
Patagonia I have frequently seen scores so deep that
no other animal could have made them. The object
of this practice is, I believe, to tear off the ragged
points of their claws, and not, as the gauchos think,
to sharpen them.’
The jaguar is the tiger of the New World ; the
puma is the lion. The puma (/. concolor) ranges
82 MAMMALS
from New England and British Columbia in the
north to Tierra del Fuego in the south. As his
specific name implies, he is all of one colour, a tawny |
brown, which is, however, much lighter in shade
below. In the young, however, there are distinct
spots, evidently a case of atavism, as with the young
of the lion. Pumas over eight feet long from the tip
of the nose to the tip of the tail have been reported,
as also have entirely white specimens ; but these are
exceptional ; the average length is about seven fect.
The puma is amzgo del cristeano, which we may
translate, not too literally, as the ‘white man’s friend.’
He rarely attacks man unless forced to do so.
As Mr. Lydekker observes in Zhe Royal Natural
History, ‘It is notorious that, in places where pumas
abound, it is perfectly safe for a child to wander alone,
and even sleep, on the pampas.’ But this respect
and good-fellowship extend to man alone. ‘Very
different is the behaviour of the puma when attacked
by a hunter accompanied by dogs. At such times
the animal is roused to the fiercest paroxysms of
rage ; and with hair erect and eyes flashing like balls
of lurid fire, it rushes, spitting and snarling, on the
dogs, utterly regardless of the presence of the hunter,
So thoroughly, indeed, is the hunter ignored on such
occasions, that he may actually belabour the puma
on the head with a cudgel without drawing its attack
upon himself, the animal receiving such blows with-
out retaliation, and calmly waiting its opportunity of
making a rush upon the dogs.’ And he is quite as
hostile to a far more formidable foe, the jaguar. ‘It
is well known, says Mr. W. H. Hudson, ‘that, where
THE PUMA 83
the two species inhabit the same district, they are at
enmity, the puma being the persistent persecutor of
the jaguar, following it and harassing it as a tyrant-
bird harasses an eagle or hawk, moving about it with
such rapidity as to confuse it, and when an oppor-
tunity occurs, springing upon its back, and inflicting
terrible wounds with teeth and claws.’ In the north
the puma is bold enough to attack the grizzly bear.
The puma’s ‘kill’ can generally be recognised by its
having its neck broken, the.animal springing on the
shoulders, and then drawing back the head with one
of its paws until the vertebre break.
He is not the only American cat without spots
or stripes on his mature coat. In the central dis-
tricts of the continent there are the brownish-grey
jaguarondi, and the weasel-like eyra, which is almost
chestnut in colour. In the Eastern Hemisphere there
are also two uniformly-coloured small cats, these
being the flat-headed cat of Malaysia and the
Bornean bay cat. And just as Asia has its black-
spotted snow-leopard, so has South America its
white-and-black, but much smaller, colocollo. The
most southerly cat is the pampas-cat, which is prac-
tically confined to Patagonia, and may be considered
as the representative of the manul, which lives in
the deserts of Central Asia. The chief African
small cat is the serval, which may, however, occa-
sionally attain a length of nearly five feet over all.
Like other cats, it has a tendency to ‘melanism,’
there being a black variety in the Kilima-njaro
district. Melanism, of course, means the change to
blackness, just as albinism means the change to
F 2
84 MAMMALS
whiteness. The ‘melanotic domestic cat’ is the
common or garden black cat of our everyday ac-
quaintance. Another noteworthy cat is the fishing-cat
of South-Eastern Asia and Formosa, and another is
the Indian jungle-cat, with its hair-tipped ears,
which differs but slightly from the caracal that, in .
its turn, leads on to the lynxes, which are found all
round the Northern Hemisphere. Two other cats of
importance are the Egyptian cat (/. caffra), from
which the domestic cats of Europe are probably
descended, and the Indian desert-cat (/ ornata),
from which the domestic cats of Asia came, the
Persian breed being by some naturalists considered
to trace its pedigree back to the manul. But we
have had cats enough. Two we must mention—the
Malaysian clouded leopard, or ‘tiger of the trees,’
which lives on the birds and small mammals it can
catch among the branches, and the long-legged,
small-headed Indian hunting leopard, which differs
so much from the rest in its appearance, in its teeth,
and in its claws, that it is now no longer classed
as a Felzs, but has a genus to itself, being known as
Cynelurus gubatus.
Among the fossils of the Miocene we find the
intermediate forms by which the gap is bridged be-
tween the Melde and the Viverride. The civets
are an interesting but somewhat odoriferous group,
confined, with two exceptions, to Africa and Southern
Asia. The most remarkable of them is, perhaps, the
peculiarly savage fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox), the
largest carnivore of Madagascar, which is plantigrade
in its hind feet and digitigrade in its front feet, which
HYAINAS 85
alone are padded. He has thirty-six teeth ; the true
civets have forty. There is only one true civet (Vzverra
ctvetta) in Africa; all the others are Asiatic. In
Miocene times there were civets in Europe, and even
in England. The genets are nearly all African,
though one of them (Genetta vulgaris) ranges into
the south of France, having, like the magot, pro-
bably crossed at Gibraltar before the straits existed.
The linsangs are all Asiatic but one, and he is found
on the West Coast of Africa; the palm-civets are
also Asiatic, with a single representative on the West
Coast of Africa. The binturong, or bear-cat, has a
genus to himself (Avctzetzs) ; he lives in the trees, as
do the palm-civets. Another of the family having a
genus to himself is the Cywogale of Malaysia, who is
happy in his varied fare, for not only does he climb
trees and eat fruit, but he hunts on land for mam-
malian flesh, and swims and dives in the water in
search of fishes and crabs. To the last group of
the Viverride belong the weasel-like mongooses of
which we have heard so much with regard to their
vermin-catching and snake-destroying powers. One
of these (Herpestes urva) devotes himself mainly to
the pursuit of frogs and crabs. Another (HZ. zchneu-
mon) has an insatiable appetite for crocodile eggs.
The sole representative of the Proteleide is the
African Aard-wolf, who is not unlike a hyzena, with a
pointed muzzle and long ears, and five toes instead
of four on his front paws. He feeds mainly on
white ants and carrion, and lives in a burrow of his
own making.
The hyenas are the most dog-like of the cats, and
86 MAMMALS
though generally given a bad name, are by no means
untamable, and have even been used as watchdogs.
Like dogs, their claws are not retractile. They have
the strongest jaws of all the carnivores, their conical
premolars being so buttressed up with fore-and-aft
tubercles that, aided by the flesh-teeth and tusks, a
hyzena, as Mr. Lydekker says, ‘is able to crunch in
its jaws the shin-bone of an ox almost as readily as
a dog can break that of a fowl.’ There are quite a
number of species of hyzena, but three only are now
known as living. Of these, the striped one (7. striata)
is both Asiatic and African; but the brown one (ZH.
brunnea) and the spotted or laughing one (4. crocuta)
are exclusively African.
The striped hyzena seems to have ranged over all
the Old World, and is an animal of respectable
antiquity, for its teeth have been found fossil even in
England. In Syria and Palestine its favourite haunts
are the rock-cut tombs, but it does not confine its
attention to dead meat, for a donkey belonging to
one of Canon Tristram’s servants was killed by a
hyena, and it often carries off dogs and sheep and
goats. Like all hyzenas, it is very high and heavy on
the fore legs, and the prints made by the hind feet
are very light and small. Colonel Sykes brought
one of these hyenas home from India with him,
and placed it in the Zoological Gardens. It had
been as faithful and playful as many a dog. When
the colonel paid any of his occasional visits to the
Gardens, it always recognised him instantly among
the crowd. One day when he came, the hyzna was
asleep and he called it by name. The animal jumped
ANECDOTE OF A HYANA 87
up and rushed at the bars of the cage to rub its head
there, and then bounded about, yelping its joy. When
the colonel went away it invariably stood and looked
after him mournfully until he was out of sight.
The brown hyzena has a much more woolly coat
than the others. He is found in both East and West
Africa, on the rocky districts near the coast, and in
the east he has been seen on Kilima-njaro. The
spotted hyzena is the largest of the existing species ;
his legs are more equal in length than those of the
others, and he is also distinguished from them by his
teeth. In early days he ranged all over Europe, and
his remains have even been found in Yorkshire and
the Mendips. He hunts in packs and is a singularly
daring and vigorous animal. According to Mr. H. H.
Johnston, he will not only carry off sheep and calves,
but even children. Mr. Johnston gives an instance
of one attempting to possess himself of a sick man.
Mr. Galton relates how one tried to run off with an
old woman, in one of the best hyzna stories yet
published :—‘ This man’s nose,’ he says, ‘was seized
by a hyena while he was asleep on his back—very
unpleasant, and an excellent story to frighten children
with. I could hardly believe it, until a case occurred
quite a propos. An old Bushwoman, who encamped
under the lee of a few sticks and reeds that she had
bent together, after the custom of those people, was
sleeping coiled up close round the fire, with her lank
feet straggling out in the dark, when a hyena, who
was prowling about in the early morning, laid hold
of her heel and pulled her bodily half out of the
hut. Her howls alarmed the hyzna, who quitted his
88 MAMMALS
hold ; and she hobbled up next morning to us for
plaisters and bandages. The very next night the
old lady slept in the same fashion as before, and the
hyena came in the same way and tugged at her
heel, just as he had done the previous evening. The
poor creature was in a sad state, and one of Mr.
Hahn’s men sat up the next night to watch for the
animal. I squatted in the shade of her house, my
companion covered a side-path, and the woman
occupied her hut as a bait. It was a grand idea,
that of baiting with an old woman. The hyena
came along the side-path, and there received his
quietus.’
The dogs (Canide@) are found in all the five con-
tinents. Their dental formula we have given, but it
is important to notice that their upper flesh-tooth,
which is the fourth premolar, has a stout bilobed
blade, while the lower flesh-tooth, or first molar, has
a compressed bilobed blade A dog is longer than
a cat in the muzzle, and shorter in the tail ; his skull
is longer, with the orbits very wide behind; and his
shoulder-girdle is different, the clavicles being small.
Dogs, as a rule, hunt in packs, and run their prey
down, while cats hunt singly, and take their prey by
surprise. Dogs are an oldish family in the world,
but we have only to go deep enough into the rocks
to find that they and the civets had a common
ancestor.
Domesticated dogs appear to be in all cases
merely tame varieties of the local wild dogs, modified
according to man’s fancy by careful cross-breeding.
Among the wild representatives of the genus the
JACKALS 89
largest are the wolves, of which but one species—
that peculiar to the Falkland Islands—is known
south of the equator. The typical wolf (C. lupus)
is yellowish grey, but there are red wolves, and
black wolves, and white wolves, and, in Tibet, a
shaggy black-and-white variety. The coyote (C.
_latrans) is much smaller than the common wolf, and
his coat varies with the season from reddish brown to
whitish grey. He is a North American, heard of in
late years as far south as Costa Rica, driven south, so
the theory goes, by constant persecution. Between
his present southerly limit and his Falkland cousin
(C. antarcticus) there is the whole length of South
America. Another wolf, with a species to himself,
is the Abyssinian one (C. szmensis), but he is half a
jackal.
The jackals are smaller than the wolves. They
have a wide distribution in the Old World, being
found in South Eastern Europe, in Southern Asia,
and, at odd intervals, all the way down East
Africa from Egypt to the Cape, and even in the
Gaboon country on the other coast. No jackal is
particular in his diet, but, besides acting as scavenger,
he enjoys fresh meat occasionally, and will bring
down young or weakly goats and sheep when he has
a chance; he is as fond of poultry as a fox, and
varies his meals with maize, sugar-cane, and fruits.
That he is not as truly carnivorous as the wolf might
be guessed from his flesh-teeth, which are much
smaller in proportion to the molars adjoining them.
Next to the wolves and jackals come the dogs,
of which the chief wild species are the Australian
go MAMMALS
dingo, the Siberian dog, the Indian dog, the raccoon-
dog of China, and the colpeo, and two or three other’
South American species, including the carasissi (C.
cancrivorus), which, like the crab-eating macaque and
the cynogale, is not above adding crustaceans to his
SS ey bb
ESKIMO DOGS
bill of fare. The wildest of the domesticated varie-
ties is that known as the Eskimo dog, which, with a
slight difference in colour, is found on both sides of
the Arctic Sea. On the American side his life has
often been described ; on the Asiatic side he has a
harder time of it when at work, but he has a summer
ESKIMO DOG 9g!
holiday, in which he is turned out to run wild and
find his own living. ‘During this time, says Dr.
Guillemard, ‘he wanders over the country at will,
sometimes returning at night to his burrow, at others
being absent for days together. A good hunter and
fisherman, he supports himself upon the game and
salmon he catches, and it is but rarely that he deserts
his master for good. But the inhabitants have to pay
a good price for his services. Owing to his rapacity,
it is impossible to keep sheep, goats, or any of the
smaller domestic animals, and Kamschatka is one of
the few countries in the world where fowls are un-
known,’
The Eskimo dog never forgets his skill as a
hunter. One among many instances of this was
afforded by a dog of this variety who belonged to a
gentleman in Edinburgh. Whenever he was fed,
he would carefully strew some of the meat about
in a half-circle to entice fowls and rats, and he would
then lay himself down and pretend to be asleep,
ready to pounce upon and kill the first luckless
creature that fell into the temptation. The domesti-
cated dog comes of an intelligent family ; his cousins,
the wolves and foxes, are anything but dull, and man
has been doing his best for thousands of years to
develop that natural intelligence on human lines.
Man may not have entirely transformed the psycho-
logy of the dog, as Dr. Romanes thought, but ‘the
gigantic experiment upon the potency of individual
experience, accumulated by heredity, has certainly
produced the nearest approach to reason found
amongst the carnivores.
92 MAMMALS
The foxes are said to be distinguishable from the
dogs by their bushier tails, their more pointed muzzles,
and their oval-eyed pupils, which are set somewhat on
A GROUP OF FENNECS
the slant; but these differences want a good deal ot
looking for when comparing a South American dog
with a North American fox. The common fox
FOXES 93
(C. vulpes), in its many varieties, is found practically
all round the northern world, and always bears the
same character of being an exceedingly smart indi-
vidual, well able to take care of himself. The Arctic
fox (C. lagopus) changes his coat in winter to a pure
white. The corsac fox of the Asian deserts also
changes his coat, but not to the same extent, his
hairs becoming merely ringed with white. The
largest of the short-eared foxes is the so-called grey-
hound fox of North Britain. The smallest is C.
canus, the hoary fox of Baluchistan. Differing but
slightly from the true foxes are the fennecs, those
quaint little creatures with big, wide ears and bushy
tails, which, in two species, are found in North Africa,
and in Persia and Afghanistan, the intermediate
form being the South African asse fox (C. chama),
which lives to a great extent on ostrich eggs, rolling
them along from their nest to its burrow, and there
breaking them against a stone.
With the bears we enter on the third section of
the fissiped carnivora. The bears themselves are’
so distinct in appearance that there is no difficulty in
identifying them now, but in the past, during the
existence of the dog-like bears and bear-like dogs, it
would not have been so easy to draw the line. There
are but three living genera, Ursus, Melursus and
Ailuropus, the last having but one species, the black-
and-white or parti-coloured bear of Tibet, which is
not really a carnivore but a herbivore ; Melursus also
having but one species, the Indian sloth-bear, which
feeds upon fruits and flowers and ants and honey, and
94. MAMMALS
is hunted by the southern hill-tribesmen with poles
smeared with bird-lime.
The bear which has been longest known to Euro-
peans is Bruin, the brown bear (UV. arctos), found all
over Northern Europe and Asia, as far south as the
Himalayas and the Pyrenees, and in one of its varieties,
Crowther’s bear, even in the Atlas range of Northern
Africa. The brown bear ‘eats almost anything, and
fattens himself up for the winter, when he makes
himself comfortable in a cave or hollow tree and
takes a long sleep until the weather becomes warmer,
when he goes forth, looking miserably thin, to get
himself into condition. It is during this period of
hibernation that the young are born, two or three
cubs at a time, blind for a month and nurslings for
two months more.
The biggest of the bears seems to be the
Polar one (U. maritimus), who is the only white bear.
He has a much longer head than the others and it is
smaller in proportion to his bulk. He is the most
carnivorous of the bears, and the most aggressive
towards man ; awkward as he looks, he gets over ice
at a great rate, and he swims magnificently. Some
years ago the Polar bear at the Zoological Gardens
escaped, and was discovered early one morning near
the dromedary house by a blacksmith, who had come
to his work. The blacksmith, says Mr. Broderip,
looked at the white bear, and the white bear looked
at the blacksmith, who, like a valiant and wise smith,
did not run, but stood his ground and shouted,
whereupon the bear retreated into a bush of laurel.
Presently the bear put forth his nose, as if meditating
THE POLAR BEAR
96 MAMMALS
an advance, when the smith shouted again, and the
bear again drew back. This continued till the shouts
of the man collected some of the keepers, who
instantly took measures for his recapture. One of
them advanced with a strong rope which had a
running noose, and threw it over the monster’s neck,
and then he pulled and the bear pulled till the rope
broke. The bear quietly lifted his arm and with his
forepaw disembarrassed himself of the noose. The
keeper, nothing daunted, caught him with another
rope, ‘and a struggle ensued, the infuriated beast
biting the rope till he got free, and walking on, fol-
lowed by a detachment of keepers, who managed, by
heading him at proper intervals and showing a bold
front, to keep him out of the park. While they
were trying to prevent this, he made a desperate, ©
but luckily ineffectual, rush at one of the men. At
last, by dint of marches and counter-marches, they
so managed their tactics that they drove him
gradually up to the door of a den which stood in-
vitingly open, and in he went and was secured,
not, however, without dashing with all his weight and
strength at the gate of his new prison.’
The grizzly bear (U. horribzlis) is near akin to the
brown bear, but he differs in some trifling respects,
and he is larger. Nowadays his home is the Rocky
Mountains, all the way down into Mexico. His
main food is flesh, but -he will fatten on nuts and
acorns, and along the Pacific slope he is fond of fish,
and will wade into the water, knocking out the
salmon right and left when they are running thick.
Although he is fierce enough, he will in these days
THE GRIZZLY BEAR
98 oe MAMMALS
rarely attack man unprovoked, many of the rushes .
we hear of being due to his attempt to bolt into
safety by the shortest road, or rolling downhill
when shot. Often when surprised he will run away
from man. Mr. Baillie-Grohman gives an amusing
instance of this in Camps in the Rockies. ‘1 was
about to stoop,’ he says, ‘to gather in the prize’—a
fly he had caught to fish with—‘when out of the
bushes, as if growing from the earth, there rose a
grizzly. Rearing up on his hind legs, as they in-
variably do on being surprised, he stood, his head
and half-opened jaws a foot and a half or two feet
over my six foot of humanity, and hardly more
than a yard between gigantic him and pigmy me.
The reader will believe me when I say he looked
the biggest grizzly I ever saw, or want to see so
close. It would be difficult to say who was the
more astonished of the two, but I know very well
who was the most frightened. My heart seemed
all of a sudden to be in two places ; for, had I not
felt a big lump of it in my throat, I could have
sworn it was leaking out at a big rent in the toes of
my moccasins. Fortunately, the Old Uncle of the
Rockies had more than probably never had anything
to do with human beings, for I saw very plainly that
he was more puzzled as to my identity than I was
regarding his. His small, pig eyes were not very
ferocious-looking, and first one then the other ear
would move, expressing, as I interpreted it, more im-
patience than ill-feeling. I do not exactly remember
who first moved, but I do recollect that, on looking
back over my shoulder, I saw the old gentleman
‘ as ;
RS
WS
‘Sa
GRIZZLY BEAR IN A TRAP
IOO MAMMALS
actually running away from me.’ But at the same
time, once he is attacked or begins an attack, the
grizzly will fight to the last. In the south the grizzly
does not hibernate ; in the north he does. Like the
jaguar he cleans his claws on trees, but the marks he
thus leaves give no clue as to his height, as they are
generally made when he awakes in the spring, and
there are two or three feet of snow on the ground for
him to stand on.
The American black bear (U. americanus) is
rarely over five feet long. He used to range over
all North America, but he is now found only in
mountains and swamps. In the south, according to
Mr. James Gordon, ‘the bear usually makes his bed
in the most impenetrable cane brake. He cuts and
piles up heaps of cane until he has a comfortable
spring mattress. He is very fastidious in his taste,
and will not remain long in a wet bed ; so after every
spell of bad weather he changes his quarters. In diet
he has a wide, almost omnivorous, taste. In the
summer he is very destructive to the farmer’s corn-
fields, showing a decided relish for green corn or
roasting ears, or fat pig or mutton as a side-dish, not
refusing a pumpkin by way of dessert. As the fall
season approaches, he climbs after the wild grape, the
succulent muscadine, the acorn and the persimmon,
and leaves his sign everywhere he travels in heaps
of hulls of pecan and scaly-bark hickory nuts. This
is called the lapping season, as he ensconces him-
self in a tree-lap and breaks the limbs to pieces in
gathering nuts and fruits. He is also excessively
fond of honey, and is utterly regardless of bee-stings
BLACK BEAR
102 MAMMALS
while tearing to pieces a nest of wild bees from a
hollow tree.
The American black bear is all black except his
muzzle, which is tan incolour. The Himalayan black
bear has a white chevron on his chest ; the Japanese
bear is similarly, but less distinctly, marked ; the
Malayan bear has the mark even fainter and less
definite in shape. This last bear is found as far east
as Borneo. In the Andes there is a bear (U. ornatus)
with white rings round his eyes, from which he has
obtained the name of the spectacled bear.
The Procyonide comprise two genera—4lurus,
whose only living representative is the small, bear-
like panda found in Northern India, although an ex-
tinct species has been unearthed from the Red Crag
of Suffolk ; and Procyon, to which belong the Ameri-
. can raccoons, cacomistles, and coatis, and the pre-
hensile-tailed kinkajou. The MMustelide are very
widely distributed. They have all but one pair of
molars in the upper jaw, and are allied in one diréc-
tion to the bears and in the other to thecivets. Like
the insectivores, they are a somewhat miscellaneous
family, and include such widely different looking
animals as the martens, polecats and weasels, the
mink, the wolverene, the skunks, the badgers, and
the otters.
The next great group is that of the marine car-.
nivores, or Pzunzpedia, in which the upper parts of
the limbs are included within the general contour of
the body, and the digits, five in number, are webbed,
the first and fifth toes of the hind foot being, as a
rule, stouter and longer than the rest. There are
Ss
SSRN
SS
THE OTTER
104. MAMMALS
three families—the O¢ardide, or eared seals; the
Trichechide, or walruses; and the Phoczde, or earless
seals, the last having their hind limbs stretched out
behind, while the other two families have them so
arranged as to be capable of being turned forward
and used on land as ordinary feet and legs.
The eared seals are the sea-lions and sea-bears,
the fur-seals, the seals of the sealskin jackets, which,
in the more restricted sense, are not seals at all but
more or less of a remove from the otters, or, rather,
divergent branches from a common ancestor, that
have attained a somewhat similar fitness for some-
what similar conditions.
The walrus, or sea-horse (Scandinavian Valross—
that is, ‘ whale-horse’), isan immense fellow, weighing,
perhaps, two hundred stone. Really there are two
walruses—one in the Pacific, one in the Atlantic—
with well-marked differences. Both rank high among
the monsters of the deep. Fifteen or twenty feet
long, and even longer, armed with two huge canine
teeth, sometimes measuring thirty inches from point
to socket, with which to climb the ice-floes or drag
the weeds and molluscs from the rocks—-teeth which
furnish no small proportion of our commercial ivory
—he is a gallant victim of civilisation, and fights for
his life as boldly and determinedly as any animal
hunted by man. At one time so numerous that they
would completely clothe the surface of a floe and
bring it down to the water’s edge, sprawling on it in
their hundreds, each with his head and shoulders on
his neighbour’s back, these sea-horses are now be-
coming comparatively scarce, except in a few feebly-
THE WALRUS 105
worked localities, and the Tromsoe and Hammerfest
sloops, with their curiously large mainsails, square
topsails, and three headsails, have to cruise farther
and farther north to reach them.
THE WALRUS
Sea-horses are either shot or harpooned. If shot,
they have to be approached with care, and brought
down with a bullet planted just as far behind the
eye as the eye is from the snout. Should this point
106 MAMMALS
be missed, the consequences may prove serious to ~
the hunter. Harpooning the morse is, however, a
commoner, though but slightly safer, mode of,
securing him. There are few things more exciting
than to watch the encounter between a walrus and
an Eskimo. When a walrus reaches a floe he usually
stops at the edge, until his companion behind butts
him up on to the ice and takes his place. Hence
the occupation of a floe by walrus is a very slow
and clumsy manceuvre, particularly when the herd
is a large one—a large one numbering, say, seven
thousand. In a case like this, the walrus in some
way has to be cut off from his companions. But
often the morse are met with in detached families,
and the peculiar song—half a cow’s moo, half a
mastiff's bay—directs the Eskimo to his prey. The
chase is a long one; once the sea-horse is sighted,
the advance can be made only while he is under
water. Each time he comes up to breathe, his
pursuer stoops down to hide. At last the hunter
gets near enough to strike him as he rises at the side
of the floe. The phlegmatic harpooner then becomes
excited. His coil of walrus-hide, a well-trimmed
line of many fathoms’ length, lies at his feet. He
ties one end to an iron barb, and this he fastens
loosely by a socket to a shaft of horn; the other
end is already loose. He grasps the harpoon ; the
water eddies and whirls; puffing and panting, up
comes the unwieldy sea-horse. The Eskimo rises
slowly, his right arm thrown back, his left hanging
close to his side. The walrus looks about him and
throws the water off his crest ; the Eskimo launches
HUNTING THE WALRUS 107
the fatal weapon, and it sinks deep into the animal’s
side. Down goes the wounded awak, but the
Eskimo is already speeding with winged feet from
the scene of combat, letting his coil’ run out freely,
but clutching the final loop with a desperate grip.
As he runs, he seizes a small stick of bone roughly
pointed with iron, and by a swift, strong movement
thrusts it into the ice, twists the line around it, and
prepares for a struggle.
The wounded walrus plunges desperately, and
churns the ice-pool into foam. Meanwhile the line
is hauled tight’ at one moment and loosened the
next, for the hunter has kept his station. But the
ice crashes, and a couple of walrus rear up through
it, not many yards from where he stands. One of
them, a male, is excited, angry, partly alarmed ;
the other, a female, looks calm, but bent on revenge.
Down, after a rapid survey of the field, they go again
into the ocean depths; and immediately the har-
pooner has changed his position, carrying with him
his coiland fixing it anew. Scarcely is the manceuvre
accomplished before the pair have once more risen,
breaking up an area of ten feet in diameter about
the very spot he had left. They sink fora second
time, and a second time he changes his place. And
thus continues the battle until the exhausted beast
receives a second wound, and is finally secured.
What with bears on the land and sharks in the
water, the struggle of the seals for existence is a
keen one; but they more than held their own until
man gave his attention to them. They are now a
decreasing group. The smallest of the family is the
108 MAMMALS
ringed seal, the largest the sea-elephant, which haunts
the southern seas. Many are the interesting stories
of the chase of the morunga. During the infancy of
the family the males form a cordon round the mothers
and their children, and keep them from entering the
water until the cubs are of sufficient age to brave its
perils. The male sea-elephant is a magnificent fellow,
over thirty feet in length, and when the hunters come
down upon a group he is always killed last, for the
instant he falls his wives and children disperse, while
as long as he lives they cluster round him, till not
one remains unshot. From Kamtschatka comes the
noisy sea-lion, so called from its curious mane ; and
in the same neighbourhood we get the sea-leopard,
and the sea-bear whose larger and better-developed
limbs enable him to stand and walk on shore, and
who maps the ocean beach into little kingdoms, one
for each family, to cross the boundaries of which
means a deadly fight between the petty kings. Sea-
bears are by no means despicable enemies. A case
is on record where a man was besieged by one on a
rock for six hours. Like the sea-elephants, they are
very careful of their cubs, and should a mother
accidentally hurt the baby, she is loudly remonstrated
with by her indignant spouse. But the most im-
portant of the hair seals, in a commercial sense, are
the harp seal and the common seal. To the Green-
lander the seal is invaluable. Its flesh gives him
food; its skin gives him his boats, his clothes, and
this shoes; its bones give him his implements ; its
entrails give him his window-panes ; its bristles give
him his ornaments. The chase of the harp seal has
THE SEA-BEAR 109
been frequently described. We all know how he
travels in regiments under the command of some
particular chief, and how the sentinels are thrown out
to give warning of impending danger. We have all
THE NORTHERN SEA-BEAR
heard of the seal-sleep, of two minutes’ slumber and
half-a-minute’s watch to keep secure from danger.
Great is the skill shown by the Eskimo in his seal-
chasing, either when, in his sealskin canoe, he slips
down on his victim and, shifting the paddle to the
TIO MAMMALS
left, throws the harpoon with his right, and trusts to
the bladder tied to the line automatically playing the
seal to his doom ; or when, creeping seal-fashion over
the ice, he gets between the phoca and his ice-hole ;
or when, hiding behind his snow barricade, he watches
his opportunity, should the interfering gull not give
tongue and baulk him of his prey. |
Besides the harp seal, there are the crested seal,
the bearded seal, and the common seal, or sea-dog,
which yields the skins so useful to the currier. A
clever fisher is the common seal. He will hang about
the fishing-grounds and take the fish out of the nets,
and will even swim in and out the passages between
the salmon seines in search of the food he likes best.
On the seal meadows of Newfoundland, the fields of
floating ice round which he lives, he is often met
with in thousands, and all up the Labrador coast and
off the Magdalen Islands the herds are immense.
Fifty years ago, when once the ice was met, a man
from the masthead, even with a telescope, could see
nothing but seals, so thick was the pack, and the
ships were always sure of a load. Now, through the
reckless manner in which the fishing for some years
was conducted, the catches are frequently very poor.
But enough. A book might be written about the
seals, and we have only a page or two to devote to
them. They are as affectionate “as cats, and almost
as intelligent as dogs; but we have no space in which
to do them justice.
The third sub-order of the carnivora need not
detain us long. They are all fossil and of Eocene
and Miocene age, and of such a generalised type
RODENTIA III
that they may not only be looked upon as ancestral
to the land and water carnivores, but to the in-
sectivores as well, besides filling the gap between the
living carnivores and the marsupials.
RODENTIA. — The rodents are the most
numerous of the mammals. There are quite 1,000
species of them, and their representatives are in
multitudes. They are easily recognised by the long
curved chisel-shaped incisor teeth, and by the hairy
pad which projects from the outside skin into the
mouth behind the incisors in such a way as to keep
the mouth clear of the dust and chips produced by
gnawing. Rodents are conveniently divided into two
sub-orders—those with only two incisors in the upper
jaw, and those with four ; no rodent having more than
two incisors in the lower jaw; and no rodent has
canine teeth.
To the first sub-order, the S7zmplicedentata, belong
the squirrels, the mice, and the porcupines; to the
other, the Duplicidentata, belong the hares, both tailed
and tailless. Among the squirrel-like rodents are
included the flying squirrels, the marmots, and the
beaver. The flying squirrels of Europe, Asia, and
North America have their parachute-like membranes
extended from the wrist ; those of Africa have them
starting only from the elbow. In another respect the
Africans differ markedly from the rest, for they have
a series of scales at the roots of their tails, with which
they are said to cling to the bark of the trees they
climb. These African squirrels belong to a distinct
family, the Anomaluride ; the true squirrels, with no
112 MAMMALS
scales to the tail, belong to the Sccurzde@. The spiny
squirrels are exclusively African ; their hair is very
coarse and quill-like, and their ears are very small
or, at least as far as the external ear is concerned,
wanting altogether. The true squirrels are found
everywhere, except in Madagascar and Australasia.
Some of the tropical species are very brightly coloured,
some of the American are striped, and some of
the Siberian are white; the largest are found in
Malaysia, the prettiest being our own common squirrel
(Sciurus vulgarzs), which is found all across Europe
and Asia away to Japan.
In America this squirrel is represented by the
chickaree (S. hudsonianus), which is the boldest of
his tribe, and seems to have no fear of man. Sir
Francis Head has a capital anecdote with regard
to this fearlessness. ‘I was waiting,’ he says, ‘the
approach of a large flock of wildfowl; but a little
villain of a squirrel on the bough of a tree close
to me, seemed to have determined that even now
I should not rest in quiet; for he sputtered and
chattered with so much vehemence that he attracted
the attention of my dog. This was truly mortifying,
for he kept his eyes fixed on the squirrel; with my
hand I threatened the little beast, but he actually
set up his back and defied me, becoming even more
passionate than before, till all of a sudden, as if
purposely to alarm the game, he dropped plump
within a couple of yards of Rover’s nose. This was
too much for the latter to bear ; so he gave a bounce
and sprang upon the impertinent squirrel, who in a
second was out of his reach, cocking his tail and
CHIPMUNKS 1i3
showing his teeth, on the identical bough where he
had sat before. Away flew all the wildfowl, and my
sport was completely marred. My gun went involun-
tarily to my shoulder to shoot the squirrel ; but I felt
I was about to commit an act of sheer revenge on a
courageous little animal which deserved a better fate.
As if aware of my hesitation, he nodded his head with
rage and stamped his fore paws on the tree, while in
his chirruping there was an intonation of sound which
seemed like contempt. What business had I there,
trespassing on his domain and frightening his wife and
little family, for whom he was ready to lay down his
life? There he would sit in spite of me, and make my
ears ring with the sound of his woo-whoop till the
spring of life should cease to bubble in his little heart.’
The ground-squirrels, or chipmunks, belong to
another genus, Tamdas, represented in both Siberia
and North America. They are generally found on
the ground, but occasionally take to the trees, where,
however, they never leap from branch to branch. The
sousliks, or gophers, belonging to the genus Spermo-
philus, may be looked upon as marmots with large
cheek-pouches. In America they have long tails, and
bear some resemblance to the chipmunks ; in Europe
and Asia they have all, with one exception, short tails.
Closely allied to them are the North American prairie-
marmots, prairie-dogs, or barking squirrels, who live
in great groups of burrows called ‘dog-towns,’ with
a granary for the storage of food and a good-sized
mound thrown up here and there which they use as
a watch tower. These belong to the genus Cynomiys,
The true marmots (A rctomys) are of somewhat similar
H
114 MAMMALS
habits, and are found in both hemispheres, the Asiatic
species all living in barren districts. One of the
species (A. monax) is the woodchuck, so often men-
tioned in American books.
The flying squirrels are of considerable age, their
remains having been unearthed in the middle tertiaries
of Europe. Nowadays there is but one European
species, the polatouche (Sczuropterus volans), which is
found in Russia and Siberia, and is a handsome little
animal about six inches long, tawny above and white
below. In North America there is but one species
(S. volucella), whichis greyish aboveand cream-coloured
below. All the other species are found in India or
Malaysia ; some of them will glide for eighty yards
in the air from tree to tree, but their flight is always
slightly downwards.
The beavers havea family tothemselves(Castor¢de).
One of the fossil beavers was five feet long, and there
were several species of them. There are but two living
species, Castor fiber of the Old World, and C. cana-
denszs of the New, and these are the largest of the
rodents except the capybara. They are also the most
intelligent, particularly the American beaver. He is
not only a mere burrower as his European relative is
becoming to be, but an architect and an engineer. He
builds his lodge of wood of his own felling, and these
lodges are in towns, and in association with his fellow-
townsmen; he builds a dam to keep the water ata
convenient level, and even excavates a canal to bring
the trees along on whose bark and wood he feeds. The
work he does is wonderful. Mr. Baillie-Grohman
describes how he once watched a party at work. ‘It
=
SS
THE RUSSIAN FLYING SQUIRREL
116 MAMMALS
was an interesting sight to watch the old paterfamilias
set to work on a previously felled trunk ; soon
followed by several more youthful labourers, scions,
probably, of the diligent foreman of the works. With
amazing energy their sharp, ever-gnawing tools plied
through the wood, the shavings in width corresponding
to the gouge-shaped edge of their teeth, now and again
jerked aside with a comic, vicious-looking toss of the
bullet-shaped head. Unfortunately, not having a
watch, I was unable to time the speed with which the
logs were cut. I should say that half an hour amply
covered the period occupied in cutting one log of about
ten inches in diameter. While standing, trees are
gnawed round the circumference from nine inches to
fifteen inches from the ground, the deepest cutting
being done on the side towards which the tree is to
fall; felled trunks too heavy to turn over offer more
difficulties, the greater portion of the gnawing having
to be done from the uppermost side ; hence, also, it is
easy to know, by the surface of the cut, whether a tree
has been worked on while standing or when prostrated
on the ground. These logs supply, I am inclined to
think, a twofold want; for not only is the bark
welcome winter provender, but their bulky nature
makes them good building material wherewith to dam
up the base of a dyke.’ When beavers have got a tree
down, they cut off the branches and clear away the
twigs before setting to work to cut it up into short
lengths, and these lengths are always in proportion to
the thickness of the tree, the thicker trees being in
shorter sections. ‘In moving cuttings of this descrip-
tion, says Mr. Morgan, ‘they are quite ingenious.
BEAVERS 117
They shove and roll them with their hips, using also
their legs and tails as levers, moving sideways in the
act. In this way they move the larger pieces from
the more or less elevated ground on which the de-
BEAVERS =
ciduous trees are found over the uneven but generally
descending surface to the pond. After one of these
cuttings has been transported to the water, a beaver,
placing one end of it under his throat, pushes it before
118 MAMMALS
him to the place where it is to be sunk.’ Many of the
beaver dams are three or four hundred feet long, and
perhaps a dozen feet or more in width, with occasion-
ally a single furrow in the crest for the water to escape
through when the stream is at the average level.
Some of these constructions are 1,000 years old, and
owing to the work of the beaver in the present and
the past large tracts of country have been covered
with water, and meadows formed where once the
forest grew.
The beavers are the last of the Sccuromorpha ; in
the Myomorpha there are four families—Myoxde,
consisting of the dormice; Murid@, comprising the
other mice and rats and voles ; Geomyzde, represented
by the American pouched rat; and Dizpodid@, embrac-
ing the jerboas. In all these, as in the hares and
rabbits, the tibia and fibula are joined at the end,
whereas among the squirrels the shank-bones are
always separate. The dormice are recognisable at
once by their bushy tails, the jerboas by their long
hindlegs. The mouse family are represented all over
the world, even in Australia; and it is no exaggera-
tion to say that they live in millions. In Germany
the hamsters are so numerous that in one year in
one district alone 100,000 were killed; in America
the white-footed mouse is as common as the ordinary
mouse is in England; the voles occasionally swarm
in such numbers as to constitute a veritable plague ;
the lemmings migrate in huge armies across Norway,
clearing everything in their track, like so many ants
keeping straight on, even swimming rivers and climb-
ing mountains, crowding on in countless thousands
FIELD VOLES
120 MAMMALS
to be drowned in the sea. The black rat came from
Asia in the twelfth century to swarm allover Europe ;
the brown rat, from Central Asia, swam the Volga in
thousands in 1727, to almost wipe out the black rat,
and spread not only over Europe, but take ship to
America and there increase quite as alarmingly. So
plentiful are the brown rats of Paris that over 16,000
a month are killed in the slaughterhouses. Some of
the small rodents are really beautiful, one of the
prettiest being the harvest mouse, the smallest but one
of our native mammals, which was discovered by Gil-
bert White of Selborne, and makes a nest of woven
grass blades about as big as a cricket ball, and feeds
its young from the outside of it, clinging to the grass
as it does so by its prehensile tail.
The third group of rodents with only two incisor
teeth is that containing the porcupines. Most of these
are American. The coypu, known in commerce and in
its South American home as the nutria, is one of the
largest of the family, and is often over two feet long ;
the West Indian hutias also attain respectable sizes.
Another conspicuous member of this group is the
porcupine—that is, the ‘spiny pig,’ called a pig be-
cause of its grunting powers—which is found in Europe,
Asia, and Africa, and has allies in America which
climb trees and have prehensile tails. The largest of
all the rodents is the South American capybara, whose
habits are those of a hippopotamus and who is nearly a
yard in length. Close akin to him in structure are the
cavies or guinea-pigs, so-called owing to a limited
knowledge of geography which confused Guinea on the
West Coast of Africa, where the cavies do not exist,
HARVEST MICE
122 MAMMALS
with Guiana in the north-east of South America,
where they are found in abundance.
The second sub-order of rodents—those with four
upper incisors—need not detain us long. It comprises
the picas, which have hardly any tails, and the
common hares and rabbits. The picas are found in
THE PORCUPINE
the mountains of Northern Asia, in the south-eastern
district of Europe, and on the slopes of the Rockies.
There are about a dozen species of them, the best
known being Lagomys alpinus, which is continually
whistling like a woodpecker. Of the hares and rabbits
we need say nothing, except, perhaps, to recall the fact
that Cowper the poet found hares almost as intelligent
CETACEA 123
as dogs. One of his pets would, he says, ‘invite me
to the garden by drumming upon my knee, and by
a look of such expression as it was not possible to
misinterpret. If this rhetoric did not immediately
succeed, he would take the skirt of my coat between
his teeth and pull it with all his force.
CETACEA.— In this order are grouped most of
the mammals that live in the water. Like the mammals
of the land, their young are born alive, and are fed
with milk in their babyhood; and the mothers bear
great affection towards their offspring, and will even
risk their lives in shielding them from danger. They
all have horizontal tails and no hind limbs, although
the rudiments of legs are often found within the body
frame. They all breathe air, and have an elaborate
development of blood-vessels enabling them to take
their breathing leisurely, long intervals elapsing be-
tween their inspirations. They are conveniently sorted
into two main divisions, those with teeth and those
without, the toothed division including the dolphins
and some of the whales, the toothless consisting of
the whalebone whales; the relationship between the
two being so distant that it has been proposed to
have two separate orders for them instead of one.
The toothless whales have their mouths furnished,
more or less abundantly, with the baleen or whale-
bone plates through which they strain off the mouth-
fuls of water in which they catch the multitude of
small animals on which they live. The right whales
have the most baleen and the smallest throats ; ‘a
herring, as the sailors say, ‘is big enough to choke
124 MAMMALS
them ;’ they manage to swim upright without a fin
to their back, and they have no wrinkles about the
throat. The rorquals (vork-wals) are the whales with
the ‘rorks’ or wrinkles under the throat ; they have a
longish back-fin somewhat like a hook in shape; and
they feed chiefly on codfish. Intermediate between
these are the grey whale of the North Pacific with
no fin on the back, the pigmy whale of Australasia
with a very small back-fin and a smooth throat-skin,
and the humpback whale of most seas, with a rather
larger back-fin and a wrinkled throat-skin, the fin
rising from a sort of hump, the animal’s head being
proportionately larger than among the rorquals. The
baleen whales can be distinguished from the others at
a glance by the way they ‘blow.’ The nostrils of a
baleen whale are at the top of his. head, and he spouts
vertically, while the nostrils of the others are at the
tip of their snout, and they spout diagonally forwards
—the spouting being, it need hardly be said, the
humid heated air expelled from the lungs, which
condenses as it ascends and often takes some of the
surface water up with it. The whale only blows when
he rises and just before he dives, at other times he
will float at his ease on the surface, breathing quietly
like any other mammal. The Greenland whale blows
for seven times or more, and then dives for a quarter of ©
an hour, although a harpooned whale has been known
to stay under water for fifty minutes. This whale,
like all the right whales, is never very brisk in his
movements. His ordinary swimming speed is four
miles an hour, with a power of working up to eight
-in times of peril. The rorquals are a much more
THE WHALE 125
active lot, and some of them, according to the Finnish
whalers, can remain under water for eight or twelve
hours at a time when taking their daily rest. One of
them, the blue whale (Balenoptera Sibbaldt), is the big-
gest and fastest mammal in existence, measuring from
eighty to ninety feet and more in length and travelling
thirty knots an hour. Like all the whales, he migrates
in search of food, and during the year visits many seas.
Scoresby says that rorquals a hundred and twenty
feet long have been known. In 1828 one was found
floating off Ostend which was ninety-five feet long
and had a tail 22 ft. 6 in. wide; and even larger ones
are on record.
Of the toothed cetaceans the sperm-whale is the
biggest, but he rarely exceeds fifty feet in length. He
was the only whale that was fished for until the
discovery, in the sixteenth century, of the Greenland
whale, which is about the same size. He feeds, like
most of his family, on squids and cuttles, and in the
ambergris which is formed in his intestines the horny
beaks of these cephalopods are almost invariably found ;
but he will eat almost any kind of fish. He is not
particularly prepossessing in appearance, a fourth of
his length being devoted to a head which is chiefly
noticeable for its massiveness. He has only rudimentary
teeth in his upper jaw, but in his lower jaw he has
from forty to fifty substantial stumps, all ivory and
all rounded like pegs, which fit into a groove above
them, so that when the mouth is closed there is no
escape from destruction. His mouth is white, his
tongue is white, and his throat is large, and it has
been suggested that when seeking food he remains at
126 ' ' MAMMALS
rest with his mouth wide open, and snaps his jaws
together when anything he fancies comes swimming
into them. His top speed is twelve knots, and when
he rises to blow he is about twelve minutes at the
surface, and he dives to enormous depths, having
been known to run out nearly a mile of line when
harpooned. This is the large sperm- -whale or cachalot,
Physeter macrocephalus ; the small sperm-whale, Cogda
breviceps, is more like a porpoise. The other sperm-
whales are found only as fossils, all from comparatively
recent rocks, the whales apparently not dating vely,
far back in the past. F
The xiphioid whales have only two or four teeth
in the lower jaw, the most familiar of this group being
the North Atlantic bottlehead (Hyperiodon rostratus),
which has but two, and these hidden inthe gum. The
bottlehead, so called from the lump in front of the
blow-hole, is about thirty feet long ; he is black when
he is young, and turns yellow and white as he
grows old; and, like the sperm-whale, he yields sperm-
oil and spermaceti, or substances so similar to them
that they answer the same purposes. He does not
always keep to the open sea: he is frequently found
in the English Channel, and he was once caught above
London Bridge. Like all the whales, he has not much
of a neck to speak of, but like all of them, and like
nearly all other mammals, he has just as many
vertebree in it—seven—as there are in the neck of the
giraffe.
The dolphins and porpoises are all grouped as
Delphinide. There are a large number of them,
most of them being marine, some estuarine, and a few
j
:
:
.
.
:
:
THE NARWHAL : 127
even fresh-water. The fresh-water dolphins, properly
so called, are assigned, however, to the family called
after Platanista, the generic name of the blind dolphin
of the Ganges. To the naturalist there is much
interest in these fresh-water forms, owing to Sir
William Flower’s suggestion that in their transition
from terrestrial to marine life, the cetaceans may have
passed through a stage in which they lived on river
banks and in rivers, fog which they afterwards mi-
grated to the sea.
Belonging to this dolphin-like group is the white
whale, often over sixteen feet long, almost pure
white in colour, and without a back-fin. Resembling
it in everything but its teeth, is the narwhal, or
sea unicorn. This extraordinary animal has only two
teeth worth noticing, both of which are in the upper
_ jaw. Occasionally both of these grow out like tusks,
but as a rule the one on the right side remains in a
rudimentary state, as both do in the case of the
females, and the other runs out straight for six feet or
so. What the narwhal does with his horn is not very
clear. Some travellers tell us that he uses it asa fork
to skewer up the flat-fish from the bottom of the sea ;
never, however, does he seem to have been caught in
the act ; and though his portraits are many, we have
not yet come across an unfortunate turbot spitted like
cat’s-meat on his tapering tooth ; nor is it clear how
the female would get on unless her mate fed her with
the fork. Others relate how it is used as a gimlet for
boring blow-holes in the ice, but the statement is not
made from personal observation. Others describe it
as a weapon of offence and defence, used much as
THE DOLPHIN 129
the sword was in the duels of the past by the rival
suitors for a lady’s hand, and aver that narwhals are
occasionally seen engaged in friendly fencing matches
—which may or may not be true. At any rate, its
end is always worn and polished, so that it would seem
to be in constant use.
The dolphin himself, Delphinus delphis, is not in
the least like his heraldic presentment, so typically
shown in the lamps on the Thames Embankment.
He is dark on the back and satiny white beneath,
but not even in the agonies of death does he change
colour, though, like all other dead things, the body
becomes slightly phosphorescent during decompo-
sition. Like the porpoise, his flesh is good eating.
In tenderness and flavour dolphin is to porpoise what
lamb is to mutton. He is the common dolphin of
all seas, and the real original Heeros zcthys. He is not
a fish, but a carnivorous cetacean with interlocking
teeth, and a convex snout separated from the fore-
head by a furrow. He is larger than the porpoise,
averaging nine feet in length; and ‘he is one of the
swiftest mammals that swim. He is almost the
greediest ; his teeth enable him to seize his prey, but
not to nip it,and he swallows his foodalive and whole
like the rest of his family. He is the reputed foe of
the flying-fish, though the distinction really belongs
almost entirely to his fishy namesake, known other-
wise as the dorado.
_The porpoise, Phocena communis, is the most
familiar cetacean around our coasts. He is at once
distinguishable by his teeth, which are about twenty
in number and have compressed spade-shaped crowns.
I
130 MAMMALS
Porpoises feed on fish, and follow the shoals for days,
being often captured in the fishermen’s nets. Their
peculiarly graceful curves as they rise from the water
to breathe and dive again, and the speed at which
they swim, are well known. The back-fin, so con-
spicuous in the common porpoise, is absent in the
Indian one.
As porpoises feed on fish, so they, in their turn,
are fed on, one of their greatest enemies being one
of their own family, the grampus, which is the only
cetacean preying on cetaceans. A grampus has been
known to swallow four porpoises one after another.
The grampus, Orca gladiator, otherwise the killer
whale, is the powerful swimmer with the big
back-fin, met with in all the world’s seas, and occa-
sionally up many of its rivers. There were even
three killers in the Thames one spring morning
in 1890, disporting themselves off Battersea Park.
They swim in packs, and so fierce are they that they
master the Greenland whale, and will swim into his
mouth to eat out his tongue. The killer has from
forty to fifty teeth, which are much larger than those
of any other dolphin, but are of the usual peg-like
shape, which it has been endeavoured to derive from
the splitting up into threes of some such trilobed
teeth as appear-in a few of the seals.
UNGULATA.—In this order are grouped the
animals whose toe-nails are more or less expanded
into hoofs. It contains a very large number of
species of the first importance in the food-supply of
man. The cattle and sheep, the deer and horses
A SCHOOL OF PORPOISES
12
132 MAMMALS
and pigs and elephants, all in it find their place,
forming such a vast assemblage that any survey of
it would be hopelessly involved without a little pre-
liminary elimination. In the first place, then, we can
set aside the elephants, which are so distinguishable
by their trunks that they have been relegated to a
separate sub-order, the Proboscidea. Closely allied to
them are the little hyraces, or coneys, which have
a sub-order all to themselves, the Hyracotdea. The
extinct sub-orders need not detain us, and we are
left with an enormous crowd that we can halve into
those who have the middle toe larger than the rest,
and those in whom the third and fourth toes are
equally developed, so as to form the familiar ‘cloven
hoof’ These latter are the even-toed ungulates, the
Artiodactyla (from the Greek avizos, even, and daktulos,
a finger or toe). The others are the Perissodactyla,
in which the ‘ perisso’ comes from the Greek perzssos,
uneven. The even-toed group we can split up into
four sections. First, there are the Swzva, including
the pigs, peccaries, and hippopotami; then there are
the Zylopoda, or pad-foots, comprising the camels
and llamas; then there are the Pecora, including the
deer, giraffes, antelopes, sheep and cattle ; and lastly
we are left with the 7vagulena, or chevrotains, par-
taking at one and the same time of the characteristics
of the pigs, the camels, and the deer, and forming an
intermediate series that cannot well be assigned to
any one of the other three.
The pecora are ruminants, for they all chew the
cud. They have a complicated stomach of three or,
more generally, four chambers, known respectively as
THE RUMINANTS 133
the rumen, or paunch, to the left of the gullet, and
the retzculum, or honey-comb bag, the psaltertum, or
moniplies, and the abomasum, or reed, to the right of
the gullet. While the animal grazes the food goes into
the paunch, but when the animal rests the softened
food is returned to the mouth for further chewing, and
thence, avoiding the paunch to the left, it passes to
the right, by way of the honey-comb bag and psal-
terium, into the reed, which is the stomach in which
digestion takes place.
The ruminants are separable into four groups, of
which the Cervide and Bovide are the chief; the
intermediate two being the Guirafide, to which
belong the giraffes, and the Azztlocapride, to which
belongs the prong-buck, or North American antelope.
The Cervide are the deer; the Bovide are all the
ruminants with hollow horns, except the prong-buck.
It will be apparent at once that even the Bovidee
might have a book to themselves. What an array
they make! All the cattle, with and without humps,
the musk-ox, the sheep, the goats, and antelopes in
all their varieties, wild and domesticated, none of
which ever shed their horns.
The cattle have smooth, untwisted horns, and are
all assigned to the genus Bos, the chief species being
B. taurus. This includes the aurochs, now extinct,
but to a certain extent represented by the Chillingham
and other wild cattle of our British parks, and the
domestic breeds that come to the butcher. The
Indian domestic cattle, all of whom are humped, are
assigned to B. zudicus. The tallest of the cattle,
standing six feet at the shoulder, is the white-stock-
134 MAMMALS
inged Indian gaur, B. gaurus. Another remarkable
species, wild and domestic, is B. grunniens, the yak
of Tibet, so conspicuous for its long hair and bushy
tail. The European bison, 5. donassus, is now extinct
except in the Caucasus and the preserves of
Lithuania. The American bison, B. americanus, is in
much the same state; the last herd was destroyed in
1883, but there are a few left in Athabasca, and about
two hundred and fifty are preserved in the Yellow-
stone Park. It is the biggest American mammal, but
is much smaller than the extinct B. latifrons, whose
remains are found in Texas. The Cape buffalo,
B. caffer, is also going the way of the big oxen. The
Indian buffalo, B. dubalus, with the tremendous
horns—there is a pair at South Kensington measuring
over twelve feet from tip to tip—is also thinning out
rapidly. The musk-ox, Ovzbos moschatus, is a sheep-
like ox, still found in herds in Arctic America, but
extinct in Europe and Asia: the fate of all these big
animals being the same—they domesticate or perish.
There are eleven species of wild sheep now living,
one of them being African and one American. The
American species, or ‘bighorn, Oves canadensis, being
perhaps the best known to sportsmen. The horns of
this species are very large and weigh as much as
forty pounds, the basal girth occasionally reaching
nineteen inches ; but, like all horns, they shrink very
much in the dry air of museums. At one time the
bighorn was said to use these enormous horns as
buffers to fall upon when jumping from high crags,
but this motive is now laughed at. It is, however, an
THE AMERICAN BISON
136 MAMMALS
undoubted fact that a ram shot near the base of the
horns will drop stunned as if dead.
Mr. Baillie-Grohman gives an amusing instance of
this. ‘The ram fell as if struck by lightning, a fortu-
nate circumstance, as he was standing on a very narrow
ledge, overhanging a lofty precipice. The slightest
THE MUSK OX
struggle would have sent him headlong down the
abyss, a fall which would have smashed his horns to
splinters. When, by crawling along the narrow ledge,
the only possible approach, I got to my quarry, he
seemed as dead asa stone. Where he lay his body
occupied the whole width of the ledge, his legs stretch-
ANECDOTE OF A BIGHORN 137
ing over the narrow cornice of rock, while his hind-
quarters lay towards me. Elated with my success, I
was hotly eager to know the size of the head, so,
whipping out my tape-measure, and not noticing any-
thing else, I stretched over the body, and using both
hands, had succeeded in encircling one of the massive
horns with the ribbon, when I suddenly felt myself
heaved up ; and before I had time to regain a kneeling
position the ram was on his legs, flinging me back
like a feather. Luckily, he threw me so that I kept
my equilibrium. My rifle I had left behind, at the
place I had shot from; and my knife I, of course,
could not use, owing to the rapidity of the whole
thing, and the precarious nature of the ground. The
ram stood for half a minute, as if paralysed, and then,
with a rapid and very peculiar motion of his body,
which I had never noticed before, made off along the
ledge, my measuring-tape fluttering in a loose coil
round his right horn’ In Mexico the bighorn is
hunted with dogs. It is rapidly becoming extinct.
Where herds of hundreds were at one time seen, it is
now a rare experience to find fifty together. The
Kamtschatkan sheep, O. mévécola, is much like the
bighorn, but has rounded ears instead of pointed ones,
and has no dark stripe down the back.
In the Mongolian argali, O. amon, and the
Tibetan nyan, O. Hodgsonz, the horns are much more
wrinkled on the anterior surface. The wild sheep of
the Pamirs, Marco Polo’s sheep, O. Podz, lives in the
Asiatic highlands at an average of twelve thousand feet
above the sea. Its horns are narrower than those just
noticed, and turn more outwards, and they are longer,
138 MAMMALS
some specimens having been measured at five feet
along the curve. The wild sheep of Europe is the
mouflon, now found only in Corsica and Sardinia ; its
horns curve outwards over the face and backwards
over the head, and rarely exceed twenty-eight inches
in length. The horns of the bharal or nahoor, the
blue sheep of Tibet, are more goat-like in character,
THE ALPINE IBEX
and may measure thirty inches in length, The
African species is the maned sheep of Barbary, O.
tragelaphus, which is also found in Baluchistan and
in Asia Minor. The flocks of this sheep always
place one of their number as a sentinel, and the duty
is taken in turns, the youngest going on guard first.
The horns of the goats are placed more upright
THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN GOAT 139
on the head than those of the sheep. Asa rule they
are flattened at the sides and roughened with cross
ridges, and are either keeled in front or triangular in
section ; but the distinctions between the two genera
are hardly marked enough to say definitely where a
goat begins and a sheep leaves off.
Among the more striking species of Capra are
the Himalayan and Arabian ibexes, and also the
European one, or bouquetin, which being, however,
only now known living as preserved at Monte
Rosa, can hardly be considered a wild species. The
four Himalayan markhors are another fine group,
with long spiral horns and flowing. beards. Some of
their horns, particularly those of the Cabul variety,
have reached fifty inches and more along the curve.
The Rocky Mountain goat, Haploceros montanus, has
the unique distinction of being the only game animal
that increases in number. He is white in his coat,
and black in his eyes, his muzzle, his horns and his
hoofs. He lives mostly among the snow, and can
climb a cliff with the least slope or ruggedness by
sheer muscular effort ; but he has also been found at
the sea-level swimming across river mouths. This
goat does not butt; he thrusts with his short sharply
pointed horns, which are only ringed for about half
their height. The chamois, Rupicapra tragus, is an-
other intermediate form between the goats and the
antelopes. The chamois is supposed to bea peculiarly
Swiss animal, but it is found under many aliases in
all the mountain ranges of Northern Europe, from the
Pyrenees to the Caucasus.
The rest of the Bovéde are known as antelopes,
aE
SFI
ia
THE CABUL MARKHOR
4
i
g
'
'
:
ANTELOPES i4t
but they vary so much in size and character from the
big ox-like elands to the hare-like royal antelopes
little more than a foot high, that itis not easy to frame
a definition to embrace themall. As a rule, however,
the bony centre of their horns is solid and not cellular.
Some of the larger antelopes in their molar teeth
show resemblance to the oxen, while the gazelles
more nearly approach the sheep. The antelopes are
mostly African, there being about a hundred species
in the dark continent; a few are Asiatic. There is
only one antelope in America, but, as we have seen,
HEAD OF GEMSBOK
he differs so much from the rest that he has a family
all to himself.
One of the handsomest of the antelopes is the
kudu (Strepstceros kudu), with long corkscrew horns
and striped body. The harnessed antelopes, 7rag-
elaphus, form another striking genus. Among the other
large antelopes may be mentioned the addax, with
lyre-shaped horns, ; the gemsbok, Oryx gazella, with
long straight horns; the beisa, O. dezsa, with horns of
much the same character ; the sabre-horn, O. leucoryx ;
the sable or black antelope, which is really chestnut-
WATER-BUCK
ee
WATER-BUCK 143
brown in colour, Azppotragus niger; and the allied
species 7. eguznus, the roan antelope. The graceful
gazelles have white cheeks as a rule, with a brownish
line extending from the eye to the muzzle. Many of
them have lyrate horns ringed for nearly the whole
of their length, and oval in section. The little dorcas
gazelle, Gagella dorcas, was described by Aélian. Its
range extends all along Northern Africa into Asia
Minor. The springbok, G. euchore, is exclusively
South African, and migrates in millions from feeding
ground to feeding ground. Besides the Indian species,
G. Bennetti, often spoken of as the ravine-deer, there
are three other Asiatic gazelles, one of them in Tibet
at a height of 18,000 feet. Round Kilima-njaro ranges
Grant’s gazelle ; in Masailand is Thomson’s gazelle ; in
Somaliland is Soemmerring’s gazelle, with somewhat
heavier horns than the others. In Somaliland there
lives the dibatag, which is an intermediate form
between the gazelles and the long-necked gerenuk.
In Western Asia lives the ugly saiga, with the
bloated nose, and in South Africa the graceful pala
with the lyrate horns, and the somewhat bulky water-
buck, known to all the shooters of big game. The
black-buck of the Indian sportsman is the only
species now left in the once extensive genus Anézlope,
from which is derived the familiar name.
The smallest of the group, and, in fact, the smallest
of the ruminants, is Vanotragus pygmaeus, one of the
steinboks, the ‘royal antelope’ of Western Equatorial
Africa, which is rarely over a foot high, and therefore
slightly smaller than the tiny Salt’s antelope of the
Red Sea Coast, or Kirk's antelope of further south,
144 MAMMALS
Another noteworthy antelope is the chousingha,
Tetraceros quadricornis, the only living ruminant
with four horns. Yet another that must not be
passed unmentioned is the gnu, or wildebeest, with
horns of much the same structure as those of the
cattle, and in other respects representative of the last
batch of antelopes.
The giraffe has the same dental formula as a sheep,
the typical ruminant formula of 0033 over 3133, and
would probably be classed with the Boude if it were
not for perhaps the most insignificant thing about him,
namely, his three ‘horns.’ Two of these prominences
are really bones which at birth are separate from the
skull but unite with it later on. They are covered
with skin and not horn, and to a certain extent are
one step further on the road from those of the prong-
buck to those of the deer. The third ‘horn’ is a
protuberance on the front of the skull forming a
triangle with the other two. The extinct giraffes had
these bony processes, which are also traceable in allied
fossil genera such as sivatherium, which was the
biggest ruminant that, as far as we yet know, has
walked the face of this earth. In short, the giraffe is
not one by himself, but the last representative of an
old and numerous and lofty family. Like all the big
‘animals, he is fast disappearing. There are a few left
in the Kalahari desert and in the north of the Soudan ;
if any person will bring one alive, in sound health and
condition, to Regent’s Park, he will receive 1,000/.
The deer are unknown in Africa south of the
Sahara, where the antelopes take their place. They
may be regarded in a general way as ruminants that
GIRAFFES
146 MAMMALS
shed their horns ; but the earliest deer had no horns,
the next earliest had simple antlers with only two
branches, and in the modern deer we have species
with no horns, species with simple horns, species in
which the male only has horns, and one species, the
reindeer, in which both the males and females have
horns and do not shed them.
The deer of the Eastern Hemisphere mostly
belong tothe genus Cervus. The red-deer, C. elaphus,
is found in Europe, North Africa, and Asia Minor, and
perhaps further eastward ; but in this country and in
Central Europe it would have been extinct long ago ©
had it not been protected. In Kashmir the red-deer
is represented by the closely allied hangul, in North-
Eastern India by the larger shou. A somewhat similar
species to these is the North American wapiti, C.
canadensis, still plentiful in the wooded western
mountains. Like all the deer, the males of this species
fight very much during the pairing season. As an
example of this we may quote from Mr. T. Roosevelt,
who describes a characteristic battle which he wit-
nessed. He says: ‘Two bull elk were engaged in
deadly combat while two others were looking on. It
was a splendid sight. The great beasts faced each
other with lowered horns, the manes that covered their
thick necks and the hair on their shoulders bristling
and erect. Then they charged furiously, the crash of
the meeting antlers resounding through the valley.
The shock threw them both on their haunches ; with
locked horns and glaring eyes they strove against each
other, getting their hind legs well under them, straining
every muscle in their huge bodies, and squealing’
REINDEER 147
savagely. They were evenly matched in weight,
strength, and courage; and push as they might
neither got the upper hand, first one yielding a few
inches, then the other, while they swayed to and fro
in their struggles, smashing the bushes and ploughing
up the soil. Finally they separated and stood some
little distance apart, under the great pines ; their sides
REINDEER
heaving, and columns of steam rising from their
nostrils through the frosty air of the brightening
morning. And several times did the struggle re-
commence, to end indecisively.
The wapiti has twelve or more points in his antlers ;
- some have fourteen points, besides irregular prongs.
The Asiatic deer are very numerous, and are nearly all
K2
148 MAMMALS
distinguishable by the number of tines in their antlers.
The fallow deer, which is European and North African,
has the upper part of the antler flattened out consi-
derably. The muntjacs have their horns on bony
projections from the skull, The Chinese tufted deer
have rudimentary antlers on converging bony projec-
tions. The reindeer is distinguished by the very large
brow tine. The caribou is the American representa-
tive of the reindeer. His hoofs are very long and
round, longer than a wapiti’s or moose’s, and larger
than a cow’s. He can cross very thin ice by spreading
out his hoofs and bending his legs until he almost
runs upon his joints. The moose is found in Northern
Europe as well as in Northern America, where he has
been driven to take refuge along the Rocky Mountains.
He is chiefly characterised by enormous development
of his muzzle. The roe-deer has only three tines to
his antlers, which rise some distance from his head
before they branch. The Virginian deer has his
antlers in the form of spikes rising upright from a
curving main fork. The mule-deer is as easily recog-
nisable by his long ears as the moose is by his muzzle ;
the brockets have mere spikes instead of antlers ; and
the musk-deer have no antlers at all, but long tusks
curving downwards from the upper jaw, the same
things, in fact, as the upper tusks of a boar.
The chevrotains, or mouse-deer, are small deer-like
animals about as big as rabbits, grouped by themselves
as being intermediate in structure between the deer,
the camels, and the pig. They have three divisions in
their stomach instead of four, and they have four
complete toes on each foot, the second and fifth being,
THE MOUSE-DEER 149
cneeihien came ecient emnensien ence
however, slender. The water chevrotain is a West
African species, worth remembrance from the fact
that its genus, Dorcatherium, was founded on fossil
specimens, the living species, confirming the accuracy
of the restoration, being discovered long afterwards.
THE MOOSE
Chevrotains and their allies are well represented in
the Miocene rocks of Europe and America. The
type genus, Zragudus, ranges nowadays from India to
Borneo.
The Tylopoda include the camels of the Eastern
150 MAMMALS
Hemisphere and the llamas of the Western.
Although the family has few representatives now, it
was at one time very numerous, chiefly, curiously
enough, in America, whence it seems that the camels
came into Asia by way of Alaska. Both the camels
and the llamas have stomachs with three chambers,
and in two of these are the so-called water-cells, which
can be filled with fluid and closed by a sphincter
muscle in much the same way as a baleen whale can
shut his throat as he drives ahead through the water.
The dental formula is 1133 over 3123. Unlike all
the other mammals, this family has oval red blood ©
corpuscles instead of circular ones.
The spreading padded feet and the water-cells of
the camel have made it invaluable to man in sandy
deserts, and its appearance in history is of the remotest.
The wild camel has been said for nearly five hundred
years to exist in the neighbourhood of Lob-Nor, and
recently Mr. Littledale went to Central Asia in search
of them, and some of the skins of the animals he shot
are now at South Kensington. But it is very doubt-
ful if these should not be looked upon as ‘feral’
instead of wild—that is, the descendants of animals
which have escaped from captivity, like the so-called
‘wild’ camels of Arizona, Spain, and Australia. The
camel’s reputation does not stand as high as it did
amongst Europeans; on closer acquaintance they
have found him as stupid as he is ungainly, and by a
long way the least satisfactory of the world’s beasts
of burden. According to Palgrave, ‘If docile means
stupid, well and good ; in such a case the camel is
the very model of docility. But if the epithet is
CAMELS
152 MAMMALS
intended to designate an animal that takes an interest
_in its rider so far as a beast can, that in some way
understands his intentions, or shares them in a
subordinate fashion, that obeys from a sort of sub-
missive or half fellow-feeling with his master, like the
horse or elephant, then I say that the camel is by
no means docile—very much the contrary. He takes
no heed of his rider, pays no attention whether he be
on his back or not ; walks straight on when once set
agoing, merely because he is too stupid to turn aside ;
and then, should some tempting thorn or green branch
allure him out of the path, continues to walk on in the
new direction simply because he is too dull to turn
back into the right road. In fact, he is from first to
last an undomesticated and savage animal, rendered
serviceable by stupidity alone, without much skill on
his master’s part or any co-operation on his own, save
that of an extreme passiveness. Neither attachment
nor even habit impresses him; never tame, though
not wide-awake enough to be exactly wild.†And this
unfavourable opinion is shared in by all the explorers
and others who have had any experience of camel-
keeping and camel-riding. In short, the Oriental
made the most of the camel as being the only animal
available in the great sandy regions of Asia and Africa,
but was never enthusiastic in his praise ; and there is a
vast difference between the way in which he speaks
of his heavily lurching ‘ship of the desert’ and that
in which he speaks of his horse.
There are two species of Camelus, C. dromedarius,
with one hump, and C. dactrianus, with two. The
wild camels discovered by the Russians among the
LLAMAS
154 MAMMALS
Central Asian mountains have two humps which are
very small, but the size of the hump, at least in the
domesticated varieties, depends very much on the
amount of food and the season of the year. The food
of these Lob-Nor camels—which are of a reddish hue,
with short ears and a grizzly muzzle—consists of the
branches and leaves of trees, which is exactly what
one would have supposed the original wild camels sub-
sisted on, judging from their anatomy.
The llamas, in the usual acceptation of the term,
include the vicunia and the guanaco, besides the domes-
ticated varieties, alpaca and llama, all of which belong
to the genus Lama. The guanaco, L. guanacus, is the
largest living representative of the genus, which in
some of its fossil allies was as large as any of the
existing camels. Like the vicunia, which is a smaller
animal, its toes are more divided than a camel’s, and .
have separate pads, while the hoofs are even more
like nails. The extinct species, however, show many
of the intermediate stages. The llama, Z. glama,
is a guanaco, bred for centuries as a beast of burden;
the alpaca, L. pacos, is a guanaco, bred for its wool.
The vicunia is practically restricted to the Peruvian
region, but the range of the guanaco extends from
the equator to the sandy deserts of Patagonia, where
it seems to be most at home. Guanacos have even
been found living at large in Tierra del Fuego. The
domesticated camel refuses to swim ; the guanaco will
not only swim in the sea, but drink salt water.
Of the next group, Swzza, there are three divisions
—the peccaries, with four toes in front and three
behind ; the pigs, with four toes in front, only two of
THE HOG-DEER OF CELEBES
156 MAMMALS
which reach the ground, and four behind ; and the
hippopotami, with four toes on the ground both back
and front. In the peccaries the upper canines grow
downwards; in the pigs they grow upwards or out-
wards ; the peccaries, too, have a complex stomach,
while the stomach of the pigs is a simple one with a
cardiac pouch. The peccaries are found in America,
the pigs in the Old World. Among the intermediate
forms elucidating the old relationship was the Titan
pig of India, which was as tallas a horse. The pigmy
hog of India is not much larger than a hare. It is a
curious fact that the young of all the wild pigs are
striped. The most extraordinary pig is the hog-deer
of Celebes and other islands of Malaysia. This is a
hairless species, Babcrusa alfurus, in which the upper
canines grow through the upper lip so as to project
like horns, and often form an almost complete circle,
while the lower canines grow upwards to almost as
great a length.
The last of the Artiodactyls, or even-toed ungu-
lates, are the hippopotami. These are all assigned
to one genus having several species, most of them
extinct, one of them as much larger than 7, appopotamus
amphibius as the mammoth was larger than the
elephant. Two species are living, both of them
African, but fossil hippopotami have been found in
India, in Madagascar, and even in Yorkshire. The
Liberian hippo lives on the West Coast of Africa.
He is a little over two feet high, and under six feet
long. The better known H. amphibius is a giant in
comparison. He can swim, he can dive, he can walk
along the bed of the rivers under water—and he can
ANECDOTE OF A HIPPOPOTAMUS 157
come up again most unexpectedly. ‘Shortly after
we had set off this morning,’ says Mr. H. H. Johnston,
‘I was startled considerably, and my breakfast went
flying out of my lap at the sudden and unexpected
bump which a big hippopotamus gave to the bottom
THE COMMON HIPPOPOTAMUS
of the boat. If we had been in a canoe he would, ot
course, have wrecked us; as it was, although he did
no great harm, yet on afterwards examining the keel
we found a decided dent in it where he had struck
the iron. I felt so cross at having my nice break-
158 MAMMALS
fast scattered over the luggage, that I seized my
Winchester, and fired it at his head as the great
creature lifted it from the water a few yards off to
see what damage he had done.†When the hippo
rises he blows from his nostrils much as if he were
a whale, but when he dives he goes down tail
first. He has a terribly large mouth with awkward-
looking teeth, but he feeds only on vegetables, and
requires a stomach over ten feet long in which to
digest them.
SKULL OF THE HIPPOPOTAMUS
The ungulates with the odd toes, the Perisso-
dactyls, are the tapirs, the horses and the rhinoceroses.
The tapirs are recognisable at once by their project-
ing snouts, owing to which they have been described
as ‘pigs with short trunks.†They have three toes
on the hind feet, and four on the front ; but one of
these, the fifth in number, hardly touches the ground.
As in all the other modern representatives of the sub-
order, there is no trace in either foot of the first digit
answering to our thumb and great toe. The tapirs
WILD HORSES 159
are the descendants of an old family once distributed
nearly all over the world, but now restricted to four
species in America, south of Mexico, and one in
Malaysia, a species having become extinct in China
during comparatively recent times. The Malayan tapir
has a white back; all the rest are black when fully
grown, but striped white and yellow in early youth.
They all live in swamps and along the forest-clad
river banks, and swim and dive, and are as much at
home in the water as on land.
The horses now walk on their middle fingers and
toes, all that is left of the third and fourth digits
being represented by the splint bones; but their
ancestors have been discovered, in which, going farther
and farther into the past, the changes of the foot can
be traced right back to the five-fingered form with
which all the ungulates started. With the horses,
the asses and the zebras are included, all of
them being assigned to the genus Eguus. The horse
itself, Eguas caballus, is like the camel in having so
remote a history as a domesticated animal that it is
almost impossible to prove that any really wild races
exist. At the same time there are so-called wild
horses, just as there are so-called wild camels; and
the variety with the best claim to the honour would
seem to be the tarpan of Central Asia, which some
consider to be the direct descendants of the old wild
horses of Europe from which neolithic man secured
the first specimens for domestication ; but Prejevalski,
who discovered the wild camels of Central Asia, also
discovered a hitherto unknown kind of horse which
has been assigned by some people to a species of its
AN Sd
a ee nly == 3 = —
SKELETON OF THE HORSE
THE ZEBRA 161
own, E. Prejevalskiz, although Sir William F lower, our
greatest authority on such matters, has dismissed the
untamed Prejevalskian as being merely a cross between
a tarpan and a wild ass. One of the curious things
in early equine history is that there were horses in
South America long before its discovery by the
Spaniards, but that these horses had died out, and
that the wild horses of the pampas are descended, not
from them, but from individuals introduced from Spain
in the sixteenth century ; just as the Australian wild
horses are descended from escapes originally intro-
duced from England.
The stripes that occasionally show in a horse’s
coat are the marks of his ancestry; his more
distinctly striped living relatives are referred to
several species. If you see a horse-like animal
striped all over down to his hoofs and even beyond
the root of his tail, you will know that it is a zebra ;
if the black stripes are broad and bold, and there are
long transverse stripes on the haunches, it is the
original zebra, EZ. zebra; but if the stripes are narrow
and numerous, and extend a long way along the
barrel, so that the haunch stripes are very short, it is
Grévy’s zebra, Z. Grevit ; if the stripes do not extend
on to the posterior, it is Chapman’s zebra, E. Chap-
mand ; if they do not extend below the body line, it is
Burchell’s zebra, E. Burchelld ; if it is striped only on
the head and shoulders, it is a quagga, £. guagea.
The asses have a stripe down the back, and some of
them have a shoulder stripe, with cr without stripes
on the legs ; but the variations are so great as not to
be distinctive. There are only two species of wild
L
‘162 MAMMALS
ass, the Asiatic one, 2. hemzonus, with short ears, and
the African one, &. asznus, with long ears, both of
them very handsome animals, and far better-looking
than ‘the wild fiery mustang of the prairies, or ‘the
noble tarpan of the Asian wilds. The ordinary
donkey is a domesticated African ass, and the
occasional stripes on its legs are ancestral, just as
are the occasional stripes on the horse. All these
animals, it may be as well to note, are very short in
the humerus and femur, so that their elbows and
knees are close up to the body. What is generally
called the horse’s knee is really his wrist, and his
hock is his heel.
The species of rhinoceros were formerly very
numerous and widely distributed over the Old World
and the New. There were rhinoceroses even in the
Thames Valley and on what is now the- coast of
Norfolk. Nowadays they are found only in Africa
and Southern Asia and Malaysia; and these are
rapidly disappearing, for the rhinoceros is a big,
conspicuous brute, much less terrible than he looks,
and easily shot ; his ‘armour’ being penetrable even
with a pocket-knife when he is alive, although har-
dening till it is nearly bullet-proof when stripped and
dried. In Asia there are three species, R/znoceros
unicornts, the Indian single-horned one, R. sondazcus,
the smaller single-horned one found from Bengal
to Borneo, and the Sumatran, A. sumatrensts, which
has two horns and is found at intervals from Burma
to Borneo. In Africa there are also three species, all
with two horns. One of these is the white or square-
mouthed rhinoceros, 2. szmus, now nearly extinct.
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INDIAN RHINOCEROS
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164 MAMMALS
According to Mr. F. C. Selous, ‘Twenty years
ago this animal seems to have been very plentiful
in the western half of South Africa; now, unless
it is still to be found between the Okavango and
Cunene rivers, it must almost be extinct in that portion
of the country. And this is not to be wondered at
when one reads the accounts in Andersson’s and
Chapman’s books of their shooting as many as eight
of these animals in one night as they were drinking
at a small water-hole ; for it must be remembered that
these isolated water-holes at the end of the dry season
represented all the water to be found over an enormous
extent of country, and that therefore all the rhinocer-
oses that in happier times were distributed over many
hundreds of square miles were in times of drought
dependent upon perhaps a-single pool for their supply
‘of water. In 1877, during several months’ hunting in
the country to the south of Linyanti on the river
Chobi, I only saw the spoor of two square-mouthed
rhinoceroses, though in 1874 I had found them fairly
plentiful in the same district ; whilst in 1879, during
eight months spent in hunting on and between the
Botletli, Mababe, Machabe, Sunta, and Upper Chobi
rivers, I never even saw the spoor of one of these
animals, and all the Bushmen I met with said they
were finished,’
But a few are probably still living in Mashona-
land, and last year two were shot by Mr. Coryn-
don, one of which is at South Kensington and the
other at Tring. The common African rhinoceros is
the black one with the prehensile lip, R. dzcornzs, in
which the horns will sometimes reach forty inches,
THE RHINOCEROS 165
the back horn being often longer than the front one.
Exceptionally this species may have three horns. It
is purely a vegetarian, and browses on the leaves and
twigs and even the roots of certain bushes; and
according to Mr. Selous it thrives in districts devoid
of grass, whereas the square-mouthed species could
not live in the hili country, owing to the pasturage
being insufficient.
Clumsy as the animal may look, the speed at which
he can move is considerable, and quite equal, for a
time at least, to that of the average horse. Among
the Hamran Arabs he is chased on horseback and ham-
strung, and a very exciting sport it iss These extra-
ordinary Nimrods hunt and kill wild animals of every
sort, from the antelope to the elephant, with no other
weapon than the sword, and defend themselves with
oval and circular shields of rhinoceros hide or the
almost equally tough skin of the giraffe. The average
sword of these hunters is a yard long, and has a
five and a half inch hilt, and a blade nearly two
inches across, almost as sharp'as a razor. With no
knowledge of swordsmanship they never parry with
the blade, but trust entirely to the shield, and content
themselves with slashing either at their adversary or
at the animal he rides. ‘One good cut, says Sir
Samuel Baker, ‘delivered by a powerful arm would
sever a man at the waist like a carrot.’ And then he
describes a rhinoceros hunt. ‘The two. rhinoceros
were running neck-and-neck like a pair of horses in
harness, but bounding along at tremendous speed
within ten yards of the leading Hamran. This was
Taher Sheriff, who, with his sword drawn, and his long
166 MAMMALS »°
hair flying wildly behind him, urged his horse forward
in the race, amidst a cloud of dust raised by the two
huge but active beasts, that tried every sinew of the
horses. Roder Sheriff, with the withered arm, was
second ; with the reins hung upon the hawk-like-claw
that was all that remained of a hand, but with his
naked sword grasped in his right, he kept close to his
brother, ready to second his blow. Abou Do was
third, his hair flying in the wind, his heels dashing
against the flanks of his horse, to which he shouted in
his excitement to urge him to the front, while he leant
forward with his long sword in the wild energy of the
moment, as though hoping to reach the game against
all possibility. I soon found myself in the ruck of
men, horses, and drawn swords. There were seven of
us,and passing Abou Do, whose face wore an expres-
sion of agony at finding that his horse was failing, I
quickly obtained a place among the brothers. The
horses were pressed to the utmost, but we had already
run about two miles, and the game showed no signs
of giving in. On they flew—sometimes over open
ground, then through low bush, which tired the horses
severely ; then through strips of open forest, until at
length the party began to tail off and only a select few
kept their places. Only four of the seven remained,
and we swept down an incline, Taher Sheriff still
leading and Abou Do the last! His horse was done,
but not the rider ; for, springing to the ground while
at full speed, sword in hand, he forsook his tired horse,
and, preferring his own legs, he ran like an antelope
for the first hundred yards. I thought he would
really pass us and win the honour of the first blow,
A RHINOCEROS. HUNT 167
It was of no use: the pace was too severe, and
although running wonderfully, he was obliged to give
way to the horses. Only three now followed the
rhinoceros—Taher Sheriff, his brother Roder, and
myself. I had been obliged to give the second place
to Roder, as he was a mere monkey in weight, but I
was a close third. The excitement was intense. We
neared the jungle, and the rhinoceros began to show
signs of flagging, as the dirt puffed up before their
nostrils, and with noses close to the ground, they
snorted, as they still. galloped on. Oh for a fresh
horse! We were within two hundred yards of the
jungle, but the horses were all done. Roder pushed
ahead. We were close upon the dense thorns, and the
rhinoceros broke into a trot ; they weredone! Away
he went; he was close to the very heels of the beasts,
but his horse could do no more than his present pace.
Still he gained upon the nearest ; he leaned forward
with his sword raised for the blow—another moment
and the jungle would be reached! One effort more,
and the sword flashed in the sunshine as the rearmost
rhinoceros disappeared in the thick screen of thorns
with a gash about a foot long upon his hind-quarters !’
The fourth sub-order of the ungulates is that
containing the hyraces, and known in consequence
as the Hyracoidea. These are allied in structure to
both the rhinoceros and the elephant, but in size are
not much larger than a rabbit. There are over a
dozen species of them, some living among rocks,
most of them in trees, nearly all of them African,
ranging down to Cape Colony, one of them being
found in Arabia and Syria. Their feet are very
168 MAMMALS
much like those of a rhinoceros or a tapir, and they
have four toes in front and three behind, with fleshy
pads to the soles, which enable them to cling to
smooth stones and smooth tree trunks. The inside
toe of each hind foot bears a claw.
THE HYRAX, OR CONEY
Their incisor teeth are not chisel-edged like those
of the rodents, but triangularly pointed. They are not
unlike rodents in their habits, and according to Canon
Tristram they make a nest of dried grass and fur, in
which the young are buried like those of a mouse.
The sub-order Proboscidea is now represented by
ELEPHANTS 169
only one genus with two species, but in the past it was
of considerable importance, most of the animals in-
cluded in it being gigantic, most but not all, for one
of the forms was the dwarf elephant of Malta, which
was not much more than a couple of feet high, con-
siderably less, in fact, than the local mouse. Thetwo
species are the Indian elephant and the African
elephant ; the first is now almost entirely a domesti-
cated animal, the other is only domesticated in
menageries, for the African natives appear to have
made no attempt to utilise its powers for the service
ofman. The Indian elephant has moderate-sized ears ;
those of the African elephant are enormous. The
molars of the Indian elephant have their enamel in
parallel folds; those of the African elephant have
their enamel folds in the shape of elongated diamonds.
The trunk of the Indian elephant has a long upper
lobe ; the trunk of an African elephant has two lobes
of equal size. The Indian elephant has four or five
nails on the hind foot; the African has never more
than three nails on the hind foot ; and the African
elephant is larger than the Indian one. The Indian
elephant is a much more intelligent animal than
the other, but there is no doubt that its intelli-
gence has been overrated. Like the camel, he has
been thought the most of by those who knew him
least. In Indian literature he is never noticed for his
intelligence ; the animals that come in for praise on
that account are the monkey, the fox, and the crow.
At the same time it would be folly to deny that the
elephant has considerable mental power, considering
the small size of his brain. We may not believe the
170 MAMMALS
wonderful story of Pliny that an elephant chastised
for carelessness in dancing was known to practise its
steps alone in the moonlight, or modern showmen’s
versions of a similar desire to please, but there can
be no doubt that he has occasionally shown a power
of initiative that may not have been thought, but was
certainly the next thing to it. ‘Elephants are con-
spicuously social, it has been observed ; ‘the herds
are usually family parties, the mothers and young go
in front, the males bring up the rear, the reason
being that the young can walk within a few hours of
their birth, and the pace of the herd must be that of
its youngest and weakest member. When a herd
takes to the water—and elephants will on occasion
swim for six hours at a stretch—some of the young
ones are held up with the trunks of the mothers, while
others find a safer position on their mothers’ backs.
To a certain extent they have a language of their
own. Elephants make use of a great variety of sounds
in communicating with each other, and in expressing
their wants and feelings. Some are uttered by the
trunk, some by the throat. ‘An elephant, says Mr.
G. P. Sanderson, ‘rushing upon an assailant trumpets
shrilly with fury, but if enraged by wounds or other
causes, and brooding by itself, it expresses its anger
by a continued hoarse grumbling from the throat. Fear
is similarly expressed in a shrilly brassy trumpet,
or by a roar from the lungs. Pleasure by a continued
low squeaking through the trunk, or an almost in-
audible purring sound from the throat. Want—as a
calf calling its mother—is chiefly expressed by the
throat. A peculiar sound is made use of by elephants
ELEPHANT HABITS I7I
to express dislike or apprehension, and at the same
time to intimidate, as when the cause of some alarm has
not been ascertained, and the animals wish to deter
an intruder. It is produced by rapping the end of
the trunk smartly on the ground, a current of air,
hitherto retained, being sharply emitted through the
trunk, as from a valve, at the moment of impact.
The sound made resembles that of a large sheet of
tin rapidly doubled. It has been erroneously ascribed
by some writers to the animals beating their sides
with their trunks.’
In captivity they are singularly docile, but the
pursuit of the wild elephant is a most dangerous
undertaking. ‘ The wild elephant’s attack,’ says Mr.
Sanderson, ‘is one of the noblest sights of the chase.
A grander animated object in full charge can hardly
be imagined. The cocked ears and broad forehead
present an immense frontage; the head is held high,
with the trunk curled between the tusks, to be un-
coiled in the moment of attack ; the massive fore-legs
come down with the force and regularity of ponderous
machinery ; and the whole figure is rapidly fore-
shortened, and appears to double in size with each
advancing stride. The trunk being curled and unable
toemit any sound, the attack is made in silence, after the
usual premonitory shriek, which adds to its impressive-
ness, A tiger’s charge is an undignified display of arms,
legs, and spluttering ; the bison rushes blunderingly
upon his foe; the bear’s attack is despicable ; but the
wild elephant’s onslaught is as dignified as it seems
overwhelming—and a large tusker’s charge, when he
has had sufficient distance to get into full swing, can
172 MAMMALS
only be compared to the steady and rapid advance of
an engine on a line of rail.’
According to Darwin, the elephant is reckoned
the slowest breeder of all known animals. He says: ‘I
have taken some pains to know its probable minimum
rate of natural increase ; it will be under the mark to
assume that it begins breeding when thirty years old,
and goes on breeding till ninety years old, bringing
forth three pair of young in this interval ; if this be so,
at the end of the fifth century there would be alive
fifteen million elephants, descended from the first
pair. But the ivory-hunter and the sportsman are
doing their best to render any increase at all impos-
sible, and the African elephant is fast on the road to
extinction. We have even recently an instance of one
hunter killing seven elephants in five minutes. But
Mr. Henry Bailey may as well tell the story for him-
self.
‘The chief, he says, ‘pointed out an elephant
resting against a tree close to the river. His colour
so much. resembled that of the tree, and he was so
immovable that for some time I could not make him
out, until at length I spotted his great ear flapping
backwards and forwards. Perceiving that it was a
very unfavourable place for getting at them, I retired,
crossed the river, and took up a position above them
on the steep bank. At this spot I was within twenty
yards of them, and could see all their heads and backs
plainly. Selecting the bull with the largest tusks, 1
dropped him by a shot above the eye. Seeing him
fall, the others ran down stream, but came back on
hearing the carriers, who were collected there talking.
AN ELEPHANT HUNT 173
They stopped by the dead elephant, when, witha right
and left shot, I settled two more. The remainder
only went a few yards and then stood still, not know-
ing which way to go on account of the noise made by
the boys. The last cartridge of the 12-bore dropped
another. Taking the Martini I killed three more, at
the cost of five cartridges, before the remaining four
broke away across the country. This was the quickest
and most successful bit of shooting I ever got in
Africa. I do not think it lasted five minutes. All
the elephants dropped with a single bullet, when hit
fairly in the forehead, the Martini having more pene-
tration than the 12-bore: In the case of those shot in
the side of the head, the bullet did not penetrate to
the brain, so after falling they got up again, requiring
a second to finish them.’
STRENIA.—This is the mermaid order, the fact
of the females rising breast-high out of the sea to
suckle their young having originated the well-known
legend. The order nowadays is of little importance,
but it is of great interest, and was much more exten-
sive in the past. Owing to the absence of the hind
limbs it was once included with Cetacea, which it
resembles in very few other respects. The sirenians
are vegetarians and feed on seaweeds, but are rarely
found in the open sea. They have smallish, rounded
heads, horny palates, fleshy bristly lips—the upper one
prehensile —and large nostrils. Like the cetaceans,
they have no pisiform bone in the wrist, but, unlike
them, some have traces of nails on their fingers.
None of them have a back-fin, and some of them
174 MAMMALS
havea complete set of teeth, while all the living repre-
sentatives have mill-teeth.
One genus, Manatus, comprising the manatis, is
noteworthy from its three species having only six
vertebre in the neck instead of seven. This is the
genus with the rudimentary finger-nails. Another point
in which it differs from the only other living genus is
in its having a rounded tail instead of a deeply
notched one. The manatis are found in the rivers
flowing into the Atlantic on both the eastern and
western tropical shores, such as the Amazon and
Orinoco, the Niger and Senegal. They are about
eight feet long, and very awkward and sluggish in
their movements. Like the dugongs, they not only
use their flippers for holding up their young in the
water, but for putting food into their mouth.
The dugongs belong to the other genus of the order,
ffalicore, of which there are also three species, and
they haunt the shores of the Indian Ocean, the Red
Sea, and the coasts of Australia. Unlike the manatis,
they do not ascend the rivers, but graze at the sea
bottom in shallow water. It may be worth a note
that, according to Riippell, the Israelites were directed
to veil the tabernacle, not with badger-skins, as our
translation has it, but with skins of the Red Sea
dugong,
One of the Sirenians has recently gone the way
of the dodo and the great auk. In 1741, Bering,
the Danish discoverer of the straits that bear his
Russianised name, was shipwrecked on Copper Island
in those regions, and there discovered the Northern Sea
cow, Rhytina Stellert, so called after Steller, the natu-
SLOTHS 175
ralist who was with him. This sea-cow was like a
gigantic manati, and occasionally attained a length of
thirty feet. It had no teeth, but the horny plates in
its palate were enormously developed. The discovery
was much appreciated by the sailors, who took quite
a fancy to sea-cow meat, so much so that in less than
half a century the species became extinct. When
Nordenskjold came home from the Vega expedition,
during which he accomplished the north-east passage
along the northern shores of Asia, he brought home
with him a large number of skeletons of Steller’s sea-
cow. In some of the fossil sirenians, all of which
were of Tertiary age, there were rudimentary legs.
Some of these early forms have been found in
England and some in Jamaica, and they are especially
valuable in indicating the derivation of the Sirenia
from the land mammals.
EDENTATA.—This is another order on the
down-grade, containing several very different groups
once very numerous and connected by intermediate
forms now only found in a fossil state. It is charac-
terised by a general incompleteness of dentition, some
of its representatives having no teeth at all. It is
usually considered as being made up of seven families.
To the first of these, the Bradypodide, the ‘slow-
footed’ animals, belong the sloths, one group of
which has three toes, and nine vertebre in the neck,
the other having two toes and only six vertebra in
the neck. Both groups are confined to Central and
South America, and spend their life among the trees,
feeding on leaves and fruits, and so leisurely in their
176 MAMMALS
movements that green alge grow on their hair.
They have enormous claws like hooks, and simply
hang on all their lives moving from tree to tree when
the branches interlock. The Megatheriide, ‘great
\ Aw ORY NM.
Pe Ve aS 4 hy
THE GREAT ANT-EATER
wild beasts,’ were huge sloths, now extinct, which
lived on the ground, and pulled the branches down
to feed on. In structure they fill the gap between
the sloths and the ant-eaters. The ant-eaters are also
ANT-EATERS V7
South American. The little one lives in trees ; the
large one, over seven feet long, lives on the ground,
tearing up the ant-hills with his powerful claws, and
licking up the ants with his long worm-like tongue,
The great ant-eater, or ant-bear as it is sometimes
called, is POrencive enough to man until attacked,
but a fight with it becomes a serious matter if at close
quarters.
Mr. C. B, Brown has a story of a Guianan Indian
who met his, death in one of these encounters. ‘In
returning home, considerably in advance of the
rest of his party, it is supposed that he saw a young
ant-eater, and was carrying it home, when its mother
gave chase, overtook and killed him; for, when his
companions came up, they found him ine dead on
his face in the embrace of the ant-bear, one of its
large claws having entered his heart. In the struggle
he had managed to stick his knife behind his back
into the animal, which bled to death, but not before
the poor Fallon had succumbed to its terrible hug.
So firmly had the ant-eater grappled him, that to
separate it from the corpse the Indians had to cut off
its fore-legs,’
Another family of edentates is that of the arma-
dillos, who have, however, a set of simple teeth.
These also are South Americans. They are heavily
armoured with overlapping plates, some of them being
able to roll themselves up into a ball in times of danger,
the head and tail fitting into notches in the shield:
They are all burrowers, and feed on anything they can
get, either vegetable or animal, dead or alive. They are
near akin to the glyptodonts, whose remains, of com-
M
178 MAMMALS
paratively recent age, are found in Texas and further
south, in Mexico and South America. These animals
were clad in a complete solid suit of armour of enor-
mous strength, which would seem to have preserved
them from the attacks of everything but starvation.
‘Why, says Mr. Kitchen Parker, ‘such a form as the
glyptodon should have failed to keep his ground is a
great mystery ; Nature seems to have built him, as
Rome was built, for eternity.’ The pangolins, or
manidz, represent the armour-clads in the Old World.
These also are burrowers, but some are tree-climbers.
They have overlapping horny scales and enormous
claws.
‘One of my friends, when in India,’ says the
Rev. J. G. Wood, ‘kept a pangolin for some time, but
found that it was endangering the safety of the house
by incessant burrowing. So, as he wished to keep
the skin, he determined to kill it himself. He there-
fore shot it with his Colt’s revolver. Instead of
penetrating the skin, the ball only knocked the
animal over, when it curled itself up into a ball, just
like the hedgehog, but was not even wounded. He
fired a second shot at it, and the ball recoiled upon
himself and bruised him. At last he was obliged to
insert the point of a dagger under the scales, and
drive it through the skin with a mallet. He after-
wards presented me with the skin and dagger. The
mark of both balls was perceptible on the scales, but
not one of them was even cracked.’
The seventh family of the edentates is that of the
aard-varks. Theseare the only ant-eaters with teeth.
They have tubular mouths, pig-like snouts, and long
MARSUPIALIA 179
sticky tongues. They are found in South Africa, in
Nubia, and on the West Coast of Africa ; and are
nocturnal animals that live in burrows. Aard-vark is
simply the Dutch for earth-pig.
MARS UPIALIA.—Theseanimalsdifferso widely
from any of the foregoing that they are now grouped
into a separate sub-class, there being three sub-classes
altogether—the Eutheria with which we have been
dealing, the Metatheria, containing these marsupials,
and the Prototheria, comprising the monotremes, with
which this chapter will end. In the eutheria the
brain is convoluted, in the other sub-classes it is
nearly smooth; and while in the eutheria we find
the temperature of the body ranging from 95° to 104°
Fahrenheit, in the metatheria the range is from go°
to 97°, and in the prototheria it is from VijmmtOnoser
The great distinction is, however, in the manner of
birth. The marsupials are, as their name signifies,
‘the pouched animals,’ the young after birth being
generally nursed in a pouch for some considerable
time. The monotremes lay eggs in strong flexible
white shells, out of which the young have to find
their way into the world. The skeleton of a marsu-
pial can be recognised at once, for, with one exception,
—there is always an exception in any attempt at
classifying—it has a pair of long slender bones close
to where the pouch comes.
One family of marsupials is American, the others
are only found in Australia and the neighbouring
islands. It is usual to divide the order into two
groups, the first, Polyprotodontia, such as the Tasma-
M 2
180 MAMMALS
nian wolf, having large canine teeth and small and
numerous incisors ; the second, Dzprotodontza, such as
the kangaroo, having small canines and large and few
incisors, and generally having three incisors in the
upper jaw and one only in the lower ; but there is one
family, the bandicoots, which is intermediate in its
characteristics.
There are two American genera, one Chzronectes,
being represented by the yapock, a curious aquatic
carnivore about as big as a rat and having webbed
feet, living in the rivers of Guatemala and Brazil ;
the other, Dzde/phys, containing over twenty species
of opossums, ranging all the way from Virginia to
Patagonia. Opossums have fifty teeth, eighteen of
which are incisors, ten of them being in the upper
jaw. Another common characteristic is the long
prehensile, and to a certain extent scaly, tail. The
‘pouch’ is not often complete, and in most cases is
absent altogether. The opossums that have no
pouches carry their young on their back, the little
ones hanging on by their tails to their mother’s tail.
One species has itshome among swamps and livesupon
the crabs it catches. In the past there were opos-
sums in England and France. To the Dasyuride
belong the Tasmanian wolf, which looks like a
striped dog, and is now nearly extinct, and the
dasyures, which are also carnivorous, though more
like cats. To this family also belong the marsupial
mice, or phascogales, and Myrmecobius fasciatus, the
marsupial ant-eater, which has more teeth than any
other animal of its class and is one of the few
mammals marked with cross bars, Among the
WOMBATS 181
bandicoots, Paramelid@, are the so-called marsupial
rat and marsupial rabbit.
The three families that are left belong to the
group with the large incisors, and include the genera
that agree more with the popular notion as to what a
marsupial should look like. These are the wombats,
of which there are three species, clumsy, marmot-like
OPOSSUM WITH ITS YOUNG
animals, with long claws and only an apology for a
tail, the phalangers, or Australian opossums, and the
kangaroos. The phalangers—the colonial name of
opossum is now by general consent discouraged—
vary much in habits; they are found not only in
Australia, but in New Guinea and the neighbouring
islands, and some of them have an extension of
182 MAMMALS
membrane from the little finger to the ankle which
enables them to glide from tree to tree in the manner
of the flying squirrels. Some of the New Guinea
species are very tiny creatures ; some are as large as
cats. ‘I found,’ says Mr. Gill, “ three charming little
passengers on board, brought off for sale by natives, of
Aroma—a light grey Belideus ariel and her two little
ones. The latter were cosily wrapped up in cotton
wool in a cocoanut shell. The mother, in her terror,
climbed the rigging, and made a nest aloft, coming
down at dusk to feed and tend her offspring. These
beautiful little animals died a few days afterwards at
Port Moresby. The Belideus ariel is exactly like a
male flying squirrel in appearance.’ One of the
Australian species is no larger than a mouse, and, of
course, has been claimed as the marsupial bat. To
the same family as the phalangers belongs Phascol-
arctos cinereus, which some have called the marsupial
bear and others the marsupial monkey ; it is much
more like a bear than a monkey, but neither term is
appropriate, and it is now only known to naturalists
as the koala.
The kangaroos, Macropodide, were tremendous
fellows in the past, but the largest now is about as
big as a man, while the smaller is no larger than a
rabbit. Most of the kangaroos live on the plains, but
there is one, a Petrogale, which lives among rocks ;
and others, belonging to the genus Dendrolagus,
which live up among the trees, and consequently have
shorter legs than the rest. The kangaroo’s foot is
remarkable for the large size of the fourth toe, the
first toe is absent, the second and third are so weak
KANGAROOS 183
as to be useless, and the fifth is not so large as the
fourth, all the four being bound together with skin
This one powerful toe is armed with a powerful claw,
with which dogs have been ripped up and killed at a
single kick. Thekangaroo is by no means a helpless
creature. He will catch a dog up in his fore-paws,
leap off with it to a neighbouring river, and then hold
hanes i See
: eS WH gare
Ketel aa Sua
KANGAROOS
it under water until it is drowned. Some kangaroos
invariably make straight for water when pursued.
‘If, says Houssay, ‘he reaches it he enters, and,
thanks to his great height, he is able to go on foot to
a depth where the dogs are obliged to swim. Arrived
there, he plants himself on his two hind legs and his
tail, and, up to his shoulders in the water, awaits the
184 MAMMALS
-atrival of the pack. With his fore-paws he seizes by
the head the first dog that approaches him, and as he
is more firmly balanced than his assailant, he holds
the dog’s nose beneath the water as long as he can.
Unless a second dog comes speedily to the rescue the
first is inevitably drowned. If a companion arrives
to rescue him, he is so confused by this unexpected
bath that he regains the bank as quickly as possible,
and has no further desire to attack. A strong and
courageous old male can thus hold his own against
twenty or thirty dogs, drowning some and frightening
others, and the hunter is obliged to intervene and put
an end to this energetic defence by a bullet.’ Kan-
garoos have even been known to kill men by drown-
ing them.
There are about two dozen species of kangaroos ;
the big ones, like Macropus giganteus and M. rufus,
are over eight feet in length, counting in the tail, and
can jumpa fence eleven feet high and leap fifteen feet
on the flat. The tail is not used to spring with from
the ground. No kangaroo, unless by accident on
uneven ground, touches anything with his tail when
going fast. His taii merely acts as a balance when
he is on the move, and is carried horizontally.
MONOTREMATA.—This is the last order of
mammals; and they are mammals without mamma,
the mother’s milk exuding from groups of pores in
the skin. In many respects they resemble reptiles, in
some they resemble birds, but really they have points
of resemblance with every creature present and past,
and seem to be built up of missing links and
‘ suidnosod & ox] yeoo B pue Joyea-jUe UL Ox] NOUS B
sey vUpIyo oy, “feos oy} UT ysoysTY ot} Aysnoraqo
+ Suroq seupryos ayy ‘seuplyoe oy} pue ‘gjowyonp oq}
‘snypuhysoys2usc) “eIQUES oI} O1e 2194 L, (S[PISTISOA ,
SQL. . FIONMONG FHL
THE DUCKMOLE
186 MAMMALS
the duckmole has a beak like a duck; a coat like a
mole, a tail like a beaver, and sleeps rolled up like a
hedgehog. Their skulls are smooth and thin, and
coalesce, as is the case among the birds. They both lay
eggs, but the echidna hatches them in its pouch, while
the duckmole hatches them in a burrow. Both have
teeth to begin with—flat, saucer-like things—but they
wear them out at an early age and develop horny
plates in their stead.
There are three species of echidna, all of which
have five claws on each foot; and in New Guinea is
an allied form, Proechidna, which is larger and has
only three claws to each foot. One species of echidna,
F. Laweszz, is confined to New Guinea, the other two
range through Australia to Tasmania. Lawes’s
echidna, says Mr. Gill, ‘is distinguished from the
Australian species by having spines on the head
instead of hair, and by the rostrum or snout being
more elongated. In the north-western species the
snout is about three times the length of the head.
The echidna has no teeth, feeding on ants and other
insects, which it deposits in its mouth by means of a
long extensile tongue. Being a burrowing mammal,
it is furnished with limbs and curved claws of great
strength. The rapidity with which it disappears in
sandy ground is almost magical ’—the rapidity being
chiefly due to the peculiar position of the hind foot,
which is turned outwards and backwards, so that the
animal practically walks on its instep.
The echidnas spend their life on land, the duck-
mole spends most of his in the water. He burrows
like a vole, making long galleries from thirty to fifty
ECHIDNAS 187
feet long, one entrance to which is below the water-
level, and the other up on the ground. Here is the
rough nest where the eggs are hatched, and here he
sleeps during the heat of the day, coming out in the
twilight to swim and dive and feed on worms and
LAWES’S ECHIDNA
insects and whatever he may find, stowing away all
the food he can in his cheek pouches. He has no
external ears, and his eyes are small, but he is quick
to perceive the approach of danger, and active as an
otter in the stream. He is a living fossil, the last and
most doubtful of the mammalia.
egy
THE OSTRICH
CHAPTER II
BIRDS
THE birds, by general consent, form the next great
class of the animal kingdom, not that they are in any
way inferior to the lower mammals, but that they
seem to. have reached a higher stage of development
than the reptiles, the amphibians, or the fishes. The
birds, in fact, are almost the equals of the mammals
in organisation and intelligence. ‘It is only,’ as
Arthur Thomson well says, ‘because we recognise
in mammals a higher degree of brain development,
and a closer organic connection between mother and
offspring, that we venture to place them above the
birds.’
Among the mammals we have seen how the
typical skeleton was modified in the cases of the seals
and whales for life in the water; among the birds
we have the same general plan podies to suit a life
in the air. Not that all birds fly, for some of them
run, but speaking generally, birds are flyers, and to
them belongs the kingdom of the air. Looking at
a bird’s bones individually, you will find that they are
much lighter, bulk for bulk, than the bones of a
mammal; looking at them when placed in their
190 BIRDS
natural position, you see how changed they are in their
Proportions to suit the work they have to do. Take
the breastbone, for instance, and notice how the keel
has appeared on it, and to what a size it has grown.
Just as the ridges on a carnivore’s skull tell you of
the powerful muscles that are attached to them for
working the jaws, so does that keel bear witness to
SKELETON OF A BIRD
the strength and development of the wing muscles
for flight ; and if you take a series of breastbones
from different kinds of birds you will find that the
bigger the keel the better the flight, until, in the case
of the humming-bird, the skeleton is nearly all breast-
bone and the breastbone is deeply keeled, while in that
of the ostrich the keel has gone altogether and the
breastbone is by no means noticeably large.
BIRDS’ BREASTBONES IQI
The absence or presence of this characteristic
keel or ‘carina’ on the breastbone or ‘sternum’ has
been adopted as the basis of what may be called the
major classification of ordinary birds into Cardnate,
or birds with a keel to their breastbone, and Razite,
or birds with a breastbone as flat as a raft—ratis being
the Latin for that rudimentary nautical invention.
Taking all the birds we know of, an earlier and
BREASTBONE OF OWL
equally simple division can be made, for we can sort
them out on their tails—by the tail meaning the real
tail and not the feathers that grow on it—the birds
with tails longer than their bodies being assignable to
the Saurure, the birds with the shorter tails being
further divisible into keeled and rafted, so far as
their breastbone is concerned. These three groups,
Carinate, Ratite, and Saurure, are of equal impor-
tance to the orders of the mammals, and are the only
192 : BIRDS
three divisions on which naturalists are agreed, the
other differences between birds being really so slight,
and the series of intermediate forms so involved, that
almost every ornithologist has a way of his own in
regard to them.
These classifications mostly depend on the presence
of several peculiarities in the bird, some of them
PARTS OF A BIRD
structural and most of them external. To assist the
reader in following them, we have here a bird marked
out so as to show a few of the external features of
importance. Here 1 is the beak, the upper edge
being the ‘ culmen,’ the lower half being the mandible ;
2 is the ‘crown, the space between it and the beak
A BIRD’S LEG 193
being the ‘forehead ;’ 3 shows the ‘ear-coverts,’ or
‘auriculars,’ and 4 is the back; 5 is the ‘alula’ or
bastard wing on the rudimentary thumb, and 6 shows
the ‘ wing-coverts ;’ 7 shows the greater wing-coverts
_and 8 the ‘tertiaries,’ 9 the ‘ primaries’ on the fingers
and wrist bones, and 10 the ‘secondaries,’ on the
ulna; 11 is the tail, 12 shows the upper tail coverts
and 13 the under tail coverts ; 14 is the so-called
tarsus, which is really the tatso-metatarsus.
A BIRD’S LEG
Just one more diagram, that of a bird’s leg. Here -
the femur is shown at A ; the tibia is shown at B j all
that remains of the other shank bone, the fibula, is
shown at C just under the knee, which you can recog-
nise, as you can recognise the horse’s true knee, by
the way it bends outwards; but the fibula, though
always imperfect, is not always as short as this, and
N
194 BIRDS
in some of the penguins it is as long as the tibia; at
the lower end of B is the ankle, which is really on its
upper portion, the tibio-tarsus ; and then comes D,
representing all that is left of the tarsal bones. The
toes are more readily distinguishable. The ‘hallux,’
or great toe, is the one at the back, that marked e is
the ‘inner’ toe, representing the second digit in man,’
counting from between the legs outwards; the long one
is the middle toe, the other the ‘outer’ toe. The
fifth toe is missing in birds ; when there are but three
toes it is the hallux which has gone; when there are
but two toes, as with the ostrich, it is the second and
third that remain. Normally, a bird has fourteen toe
joints, two being in the hind toe, three in the inner
toe, four in the middle toe, and five in the outer toe ;
but these vary, and their variations are of some use in
classification. It may perhaps assist us to point out
that B is the ‘drumstick ;’ and in our diagram of the
breastbone we showed, at the top, in position, the
‘merry thought, or furculum, formed of the united
clavicles, next to them coming the coracoids, the
coracoids and scapule forming the so-called side-
bones.
CARINAT4.—These are generally said to be
the flying birds, but the statement must not be taken
too literally, for the order includes the penguins, and
such exceptional forms as the burrowing New Zealand
parrot, the dodo, and the aptornis, besides the tina-
mous and the hoatzin, which can hardly be called
flyers. There are two main divisions at the least,
first those with teeth, the Odontornithes, and second
THE DIPPER 195
those without. The birds with teeth, real teeth in
sockets, and not mere imitations like the-saw beak
THE DIPPER
of the merganser or the plates of the ducks and
swans, having their chief representative in the old
Ichthyornis, found’ in the cretaceous series of North
N2
196 BIRDS
America, with which we need trouble ourselves no
further.
The carinates without teeth are the great aerial
army, ranging from the perchers downwards, That
the passerine birds should head the army is admitted,
but which of them it is not easy to decide. The
birds of prey, headed by the vultures and eagles, have
been deposed from their once proud position, and
the most favoured candidates for the vacancy are the
thrushes and warblers and the crows. Ifthe honour
is given to the crows, the raven will naturally lead
the van; but if we vote for the thrushes, on the
strength of their all-round capabilities, we shall
apparently have to decide between the nightingale
and the missel-thrush, who are each strongly sup-
ported. As a third candidate, if one is wanted to
take off a few votes from the party nominees, we are
half inclined to propose the dipper. There is nothing
that birds do that he cannot do. His feathers are
of the best, and yet he is the only passerine bird
with down. He builds a beautiful nest. He can
fly in the air, and he can fly under the water; he can
run, he can walk, he can hop, he can float, he can
swim, he can wade, he can dive, he can walk under
water, he can sing, and he can fight. And he is a
good-looking fellow into the bargain, with quite
an artistic feeling for a lovely home’ beside the
rippling and falling water. But as it is really of no
consequence which we begin with, let us follow one
of the ordinary tracks, contenting ourselves with an
example here and there.
Once upon a time Daines Barrington and Patrick
SINGING BIRDS 197
Syme stood in judgment over thirty and more leading
song-birds. They treated them as a modern ex-
‘aminer would so many candidates, giving them
THE NIGHTINGALE
marks; twenty each was the highest possible, for
mellowness, sprightliness, plaintiveness, compass, and
execution ; five subjects making up a hundred marks.
No bird got a twenty, the highest score was made by
‘198 BIRDS
the nightingale, who got nineteen for everything but
sprightliness ; in that particular he only got fourteen,
being easily beaten by the skylark, the goldfinch,
and the canary ; in mellowness he was equalled: by
the blackcap, in plaintiveness by the solitary thrush,
which was perhaps the ring-ouzel, in compass by the
canary, and in execution also by the canary. Second
THE BLACKCAP
on the list to him in total number of marks was the
linnet, the canary coming third and the blackcap
fourth.
Absurd as the proceeding may appear, the
result curiously confirmed the popular verdict.
Everywhere the chief song-birds are found among the
thrush and nightingale group, and everywhere the
THE REED WARBLER
2CO BIRDS
nightingale is supreme. But some there are who, not
having heard the nightingale, have singers, they think,
as sweet, say among the mocking-birds of the Rocky
Mountains, also belonging to the thrush group. Let
us hear Theodore Roosevelt on this-matter. ‘On the
evening in question the moon was full. My host
kindly assigned me a room of which the windows
opened on a great magnolia tree, where, I was told, a
mocking-bird sang every night and all night long. I
went to my room about ten. The moonlight was
shining in at the open window, and the mocking-bird
was already in the magnolia. The great tree was
bathed in a flood of shining silver; I could see each
twig and mark every action of the singer, who was
pouring forth such a rapture of ringing melody as I
‘have never listened to before or since. Sometimes he
would perch motionless for many minutes, his body
quivering and thrilling with the outpour of music.
Then he would drop softly from twig to twig, until
the lowest limb was reached, when he would rise,
fluttering and leaping through the branches, his song
never ceasing for an instant until he reached the
summit of the tree and launched into the warm scent-
laden air, floating in spirals with outspread wings,
until, as if spent, he sank gently back into the tree
and down through the branches, while his song rose
into an ecstasy of ardour and passion. His voice
rang like a clarionet in rich full tones, and his exe-
cution covered the widest possible compass; theme
followed theme, a torrent of music, a swelling tide of
harmony in which scarcely any two bars were alike.
I stayed till midnight listening to him; he was
THE PASSERINES 201
singing when I went to sleep; he was still singing
when I woke two hours later; he sang through the
livelong night.’
That is about the best that has yet been done
for the American favourite ; it is as good in its way
as George Meredith’s skylark effort :—--
He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur, and shake,
All intervolved and spreading wide,
Like water-dimples down a tide
Where ripple ripple overcurls .
And eddy into eddy whirls ;
A press of hurried notes that run
So fleet they scarce are more than one,
Yet changingly the thrills repeat
And linger ringing while they fleet.
There are some six thousand passerines alone. In
the Thrush family are the blackbird, the bower birds,
the wheatears, the chats, the robin, and all the
warblers and many of the so-called wrens, though
not the real one; close to them come the Czucline,
including the dippers, and then the tits. The wren,
Troglodytes, is near at hand, with the shy nuthatch and
the cheery wagtails. The shrikes and the waxwings
can be taken next as leading on to the swallows and
martins ; and hereabouts room must be found for
the creepers and multitudinous finches, including the
grosbeaks, the whidaws, and the weavers, buntings,
and plant-cutters. To another closely allied group
belong the starlings and then the crows, including the
202 BIRDS
raven, the rook, the magpie, the chough, the jay and
nutcracker, and then their near relatives, most beau-
tiful of all birds, the Paradiseidze of New Guinea and
its neighbourhood. Beautiful as they seem to us,
these Birds of Paradise are far more lovely in their
native wilds. Mr. Gill describes how he came upon
a group of them in his Papuan wanderings. ‘One
morning wethad camped on a spur of the Owen
Stanley Range, and being up early, to enjoy the cool
atmosphere, I saw on one of a clump of trees close
by six Birds of Paradise, four cocks and two hens.
The hens were sitting quietly on a branch; and the
four cocks, dressed in their very best, their ruffs of
green and yellow standing out, giving them a large,
handsome appearance about the head and neck, their
long flowing plumes so arranged that every feather
seemed carefully combed out, and the long wires
stretched well out behind, were dancing in a circle
round them. It was an interesting sight ; first one,
then another would advance a little nearer to a hen,
and she, coquette-like, would retire a little, pretending
not to care for any advances. A shot was fired,
contrary to my expressed wich ; there was a strange
commotion, and two of the cocks flew away, the others
and the hens remained. Soon the two returned, and
again the dance began and continued long, and, I
having strictly forbidden any more shooting, all fear
was gone; and so, at last, a rest, and then a little
nearer to the two dark-brown and certainly not pretty
hens. Quarrelling ensued, and in the end all six birds
flew away.’
In this rapid survey we have mentioned the prin-
SHOOTING BIRDS OF PARADISE
BIRDS
204
cipal representatives of the old passerine, that 1S
sparrow-like group, which in many of the classifica-
SS
NY
Ze
CLG
Ww
CEH
WEAVER BIRD AND NEST
tions is ranked as an order of the carinate division.
To frame a definition of the
group that will include
t off distinctly from the
all the exceptions and mark i
THE PICARIANS 205
other groups would be a puzzling task in the limited
space at our disposal. It will be enough for us in
this case, as in those that follow, to point out the
general arrangement of the series, merely remarking
THE NIGHTJAR
that ornithologists have been so prone to magnify
their office that in many instances their species are
given less value than the botanist’s varieties.
The next group consists of the woodpecker-like
birds, the picarians, in which many of the tropical
representatives find their place. Here are ‘the wide-
mouthed swifts and wider-mouthed nightjars, the
206 BIRDS
strong-beaked woodpeckers and active kingfishers,
the bee-eaters, and hoopoes, the cuckoos and motmots
and hornbills and trogons and toucans and the hum-
ming-birds, the very smallest of birds, whose nests are
no larger than half a walnut shell, and whose flight is
as the flashing of a jewel.
THE SWORD-BILL HUMMING-BIRD
Next in the series come the parrots and cockatoos,
allof them fruit and seed eaters with the exception of
the New Zealand kea, which has become carnivorous
since Europeans brought sheep into the colony.
Most of the parrots are brightly coloured ; they are
a well-marked group, easily recognisable, of whose
BIRDS OF PREY 207
intelligence and curious ways and extraordinary
longevity the stories are legion.
Next come the owls, of which there are some
two hundred species distributed all over the globe.
THE CONCAVE HORNBILL
Following them are the vultures, eagles, hawks and
kites and falcons, amounting to some five hundred
species, most of them strong and cruel in beak and
claw ; the series from the barn-owl to the osprey
being often grouped as birds of prey.
208 BIRDS
Clearly separable from them is the next group,
comprising the pelicans, cormorants, gannets, and birds
of that class, most of them having four webbed toes.
Then come the herons, storks, spoonbills and ibises,
between whom there is an unmistakable affinity.
Then the flamingoes, which have spines round their
tongue, in consequence of which they bear the name of
odontoglosse. Another easily recognisable group
comprises the jacanas and screamers, of whom Rymer
Jones says, delightfully, ‘The surfaces of lakes and
ponds in tropical countries are frequently covered
with luxuriant vegetation to such a degree that they
might almost be said to be carpeted with verdure too
unstable to support the weight of birds of ordinary
construction, and at the same time too dense to give
passage to swimming water-fowl. To meet the re-
quirements of such situations, which from their great
extent are by no means unimportant, a numerous
family has been specially constructed, able, by means
of their lengthened toes, to walk over the floating
leaves, and to give animation by their cries and their
quarrels to regions which without such contrivance
would remain silent and desolate.’
Next in the descending series comes the ordinary
water-fowl of the compact family of geese, swans, ducks,
and mergansers. Next to them it is now usual to
place the pigeon group, including the dodo and some
hundred and fifty other species, the most important
to man being the blue rock, from which the domes-
ticated varieties have all been derived. Next to
these come the somewhat anomalous sandgrouse,
followed by the game birds properly so-called,
GAME BIRDS 209
including the grouse, ptarmigan, pea-fowl, phea-
sants, partridges, curassows, turkeys, and the mound-
building megapodes. Following these is the semi-
reptilian hoatzin, and then the rails, crakes, coots,
and moor-hens, leading on easily to the cranes and
bustards, and so, by way of the stone-curlew, to the
numerous plovers, among them the lapwing, not-
withstanding the tens of thousands of its eggs that are
annually collected for food. : Included in this group
are the turnstone and oyster-catcher, the avocet and
stilt, the phalaropes, the woodcock and snipes, the
sandpipers, godwits, and curlews. A wider gap than
usual marks off the square-tailed gulls and fork-tailed
terns, and pirate-gulls or skuas. Following these come
the pygopodes, comprising the razorbills, auks, guille-
mots, puffin, divers, and grebes ; then come the petrels
and then the South African tinamous, which used to
be classed with the partridges, then ranged with the
bustards, and are now at the foot of the carinate list,
owing to their affinities with the rheas and emus.
At the bottom they are likely to remain, although
there will probably be a considerable changing of
places among the groups above them when a definite
basis of classification is at last agreed upon. The
mammals, as we have seen, have been sorted out to a
large extent on their dental formule and the structure
of the skull. ‘Theskull and face, as Kitchen Parker
said,‘ governs the whole body as it were ; every other
part of the organism corresponds to what is observable
there. The jaws are an index to the animal’s food,
the brain-case is a guide to the animal’s intelligence.’
It would seem, therefore, as though the final classifi-
oO
210 BIRDS
cation of birds would be an anatomical one, in which
the skull would be of the first importance. Huxley
classified the Carzzat@ according to the shape of their
vomer, the thin small bone standing upright in the
middle of the mouth ; and this arrangement, as altered
slightly by Parker,has much in its favour. Wis first
division into those with the vomer broad behind and
those with it narrow behind shut off the tinamous,
all the rest of the carinates having vomers narrowing
posteriorly. These he sorted into those with the
maxillo-palatine bones united, which brought into one
group the birds of prey, the parrots, cuckoos, king-
fishers, hoopoes, bee-eaters, ducks, flamingoes, herons,
storks and ibises, and pelicans. The rest of the birds
with the maxillo-palatines free were then divisible
into three groups: those with the vomerine halves
distinct, as the woodpeckers ; those with the vomer
pointed in front, as the plovers, gulls, penguins, auks,
grebes, petrels, game-birds, and humming-birds ; and
those with the vomer truncated in front, as the swifts
and passerines. And these main groups were further
sorted out under types. But we need dwell no further
on this matter, which it was necessary to mention by
way of caution that the old classifications based on
every part indiscriminately—head, tail, beak, claws,
legs, breastbone, wings, and feathers—are:to be
considered as under revision with a view to retire-
ment.
A bird can fly almost as high in the air as a
fish can swim-below the surface of the sea. There
is one bird which has a range in the air of over
three miles in vertical height. This is the condor,
THE CONDOR
which is the largest of the vultures. ‘Condors,’ says
Mr. Whymper, ‘ were very numerous upon the lower
slopes of Antisana. A score or more continually
\
(|
y y
\ i ,
mi
‘ 1 Hf i
iy)
i
THE GRIFFON VULTURE
hovered over the pastures, keeping ordinarily about
1,500 feet from the ground—an elevation which they
have no doubt learned by experience is sufficient for
O02
212. BIRDS
practical purposes. They did not dart upwards or
downwards, but rose rather slowly ; and, when they
had attained their usual height, maintained themselves
at it by nearly imperceptible movements of the wings,
and floated, balancing themselves in the air, turning
to this or that side, gradually descending ; and then,
by a few leisurely strokes, regained their former level,
continuing to float and circle in this manner by the
hour together. We did not either when upon or in
the neighbourhood of the summits of Chimborazo and
Antisana, or near the summits of any other mountains,
see a condor in our vicinity upon a single occasion,
and I think never observed one so high as 16,000 feet.
I believe Humboldt to have been mistaken in sup-
posing that he often saw the bird soaring above all
the summits of the Andes. Anyone, however skilled
in judging distances, may be deceived in such a matter.
It is an undoubted fact that condors frequent the sea-
shore in more southern parts of South America.
Whether the same individual birds also soar to great
heights, and are specifically the same as the condor of
the equator, are questions that I am unable to answer.
If there are no marked points of difference between
them, it will be ascertained that this species has a
range in altitude of about 16,000 feet (not in any one
country, but spread over thirty degrees of latitude),
and this is perhaps the greatest that is possessed by
any bird.’
The distances birds travel are enormous. Many
of our summer migrants journey to the African
lakes and beyond—the little willow wren, for instance,
being found as far south as Mashonaland. How they
MIGRATION 213
manage to cross the wide stretches of water and come
back year by year to the same hedgerow is a mystery
that man as yet has vainly striven to fathom.
Wallace’s theory of migration is that in past times
there was a more equable climate than now, and that
as the seasons became more distinct the birds had to
fly further and further ; those that did not fly at the
right time in the right direction would, as the necessity
for migration grew more imperative, tend to disappear,
and so the habit became instinctive. A bird always
breeds in the coldest climate he visits, and always
crosses the sea at its shallowest portion, where there
once was a chain of islands. But it is really remark-
able how many survive the journey, considering that
the migration frequently takes place in the darkness
of the night, and that many of the birds, particularly.
the smaller ones, are such poor flyers under ordinary
circumstances. This, of course, refers to the birds that
‘go foreign ;’ the home migration of the native birds
affording but little difficulty of explanation. Birds
may be migrants in one country and residents in
another. There is the robin, for instance, which is a
migrant in Germany ; and in such cases the northern
colony is always reinforced by the visitors during the
summer. Some birds visit a country twice during the
year, on their way to and from the termini of their
journeys; and these journeys do not extend in all
cases to the equator or near it. The fieldfare, for ex-
ample, finds England quite far enough south for its
comfort, and returns, as a rule, to the icy north to
breed. One bird, the snow bunting, has been found
nesting within eight degrees of the North Pole. Some
214 BIRDS
birds, like the whiskered tern, nest both north and
south of the equator.
A bird’s memory for localities is evidently as good
as its memory for other things. As a class they are
quite equal to the mammals in mental activity and
alertness. In some respects they are curiously
human. Like overworked schoolboys they will repeat
their lessons in their dreams, the lessons taught by
their parents and their companions as well as those
taught by man. In another point, too, the similarity
is noticeable: ‘Parrots, says Romanes, ‘not only
remember, but recollect; that is to say, they know
when there is a missing link in a train of association,
and purposely endeavour to pick it up. Thus, for
instance, the late Lady Napier told me an interesting
series of observations on this point which she had
made upon an intelligent parrot of her own. They
were of this kind. Taking such a phrase as “Old
Dan Tucker,†the bird would remember the beginning
and the end, and try to recollect the middle. For it
would say very slowly, “Old—old —old,†and then
very quickly, “ Lucy Tucker.†Feeling that this was
not right, it would try again as before, “ Old —old—old
—old Bessy Tucker,†substituting one word after the
other in the place of the sought-for word “ Dan.†And
that the process was one of truly seeking for the
' desired word was proved by the fact that if, while
the bird was saying “ Old—old—old,†anyone threw
in the word “Dan,†he immediately supplied the
“ Tucker.†’
The whole range of the emotions appear to be
observable amongst birds—affection, sympathy,
OSTRICHES 215
jealousy, hatred, emulation, vindictiveness, curiosity,
pride, and the sense of the beautiful are all exhibited
by them unmistakably. The scope of their nest-
building powers is notorious, and none the less won-
-derful because it is known. Every condition of
society seems to be represented amongst them, from
the solitary dweller in the woods to the dwellers in
towns, and even the dwellers in the close quarters of
a flat, like the sociable grosbeaks.
RATIT2.-—Here, again, we can begin by setting
up two divisions, one with teeth and one without.
This time the toothed brigade are represented by the
Odontolce, the type of whom is Hesperornzs, the
swimming ostrich of cretaceous days, who had a tail
with a dozen vertebre, and rejoiced in a long array
of pointed reptilian teeth set in slender jaws which
were united, as in the snakes, only by cartilage, so
that its swallowing powers were equal to any emer-
gency. With the note that he had four toes, all
directed forwards, we can leave his brigade for the
toothless ones.
Of these there are five groups—the kiwis, the
moas, the cassowaries, the rheas, and the ostriches.
Of these, the first three have hardly any humerus,
while the other two have rather a long one. The
kiwis, too, have a big toe, while the moas and casso-
waries, including, of course, the emus, have not. The
ostriches have but two toes; the rheas have three.
An interesting survival in the rhea is that of a claw
on three of the fingers, thus indicating the origin of
wings from prehensile fore-limbs.
216 BIRDS
There are two species of ostrich, both of them
African. The ostrich is the largest existing bird—
sometimes he may be eight feet high; but the New
Zealand moas, extinct but recently, exceeded ten feet
in height, and the eggs of another of the group—the
Madagascar zepyornis—held six times as much as
those of the ostrich, though the height of the mature
birds need not necessarily have been in the same
ratio.
Of the rheas there are three species, all South
American, and all, like the ostriches, wonderfully good
runners. The ostrich roars like a lion ; the rhea is
said to sing, for it-alone among the Ratte has a
syrinx in its throat, like the carinates.. Of the casso-
waries there are eight species, distributed over New
Guinea, the north of Australia, Ceram, and the islands
to the eastward. They are recognisable at once by
their horny helmets and the spines on their wings,
as well as by the long claw on the inner toe,
with which they fight. The emus have claws of
nearly equal length on all three toes, They are,
however, more easily distinguished from the casso-
waries by the absence of the neck wattles and of the
horny helmet. There are two species of emu,
Dromeus, both Australian, both very shy and speedy,
and both with hardly any wing to speak of. Lowest
of all of this group we have the kiwi, the Apteryx
(that is, the wingless one), a New Zealander, about a
couple of feet high, with an enormous egg for his
size. There are four species, the biggest being A.
maximus, all of them nocturnal, feeding chiefly on
the earthworm, drawing it forth with its long bill
THE OLDEST BIRD 217
carefully and deliberately, ‘coaxing it out, as it
were, as Sir W. L. Buller says, ‘by degrees instead
of pulling roughly or breaking it, and on getting it
fairly out of the ground, throwing up his head with a
jerk and swallowing the worm ata gulp. A quaint
THE KIWI
old-time creature is the kiwi, with no wings, no tail,
and its feathers mere bristles.
SAURUR4.—The birds of this group, the last
of the avian orders, the one distinguished from all
the rest by the long reptilian tails, are all extinct.
No toothless representatives have yet been discovered.
The oldest known is the Bavarian Archeopteryx of
218 BIRDS
the Upper Oolite age; and belonging to the same _
age, and very similar in many respects, was the
American Laopteryx. The archeopteryx was as big
as a rook, with a long lizard-like tail of twenty
separate vertebra, all distinct from one another, and
all carrying a pair of feathers, one on each side; in
fact, if the tail could have been suddenly shut up in
telescopic fashion, it would have appeared like a
forty-feathered one of the usual fan shape. The
archeopteryx had the claws on its wing, which we
have already noticed among the rheas.
219
CHAPTER III
REPTILES
No one is likely to mistake a living bird for a reptile,
but in the past the distinction would have been any-
thing but easy; and even now the internal resem-
blances are so great that it has been proposed to
class the two together. It has, however, been found
convenient to keep them separate as hitherto, and to
bear their close relationship in mind.
There are five orders of living reptiles—the croco-
diles, the snakes, the lizards, the rhyncocephalians
having only one living representative, the New
Zealand tuatera, and the tortoises.
CROCODILIA.-—The crocodiles have their teeth
in distinct sockets, whereas the other reptiles have
theirs growing to the jawbones. They have a four-
chambered heart, and a diaphragm between the
organs of their chest and.abdomen. They lay eggs
about the size of those of a goose, which have a thin
shell and are buried in a hollow in the ground, so as
to be hatched by the heat of the sun ; and when the
youngsters begin to cry within their shells the mother
220 REPTILES
opens up the nest in order to set them free. There are
only three genera—Crocodilus, Alligator, and Gavialis.
The gavials, or gharials as they are now more usually
called, are distinguishable at once by their long,
narrow snouts. Their teeth are almost equal, and
HEAD OF A CROCODILE
the first and fourth in the lower jaw bite into grooves
in the upper jaw. The gharials are only found in
India, Borneo, and Northern Australia; they chiefly
feed on fish, and one of their striking mecul nies is
that the old males have what is practically an air-
as ioe
DN) NARS ARIS
HEAD OF A GHARIAL
bladder at the tip of their nose, it being a sort of
knob at the end of the snout, containing a cavity
for the retention of air to enable them to remain
under water for a very much longer time than their
females or their young. Gharials are not very large
ALLIGATORS 221
asa rule; but G. gangeticus has been known to attain
a length of twenty feet. The alligators, with the excep-
tion of one species (A. szzenszs), found in the Yangtse
Kiang, are exclusively American. Their head is
broad and short; their teeth are very unequal in
size, and the first and fourth teeth in the lower jaw
bite into pits in the upper jaw. Another distinction
is that, whereas in the gharials the plates, or ‘scutes,’
are continuous from head to tail, in the alligators
there is a well-marked division between those of the
HEAD OF AN ALLIGATOR
neck and those of the back. There are black alli-
gators in South America as far south as Rio Grande
do Sul; the common North American species is
A. misstssippiensts, but it is not so common as it used
to be, and is now actually being preserved. The
fashion for using alligator hides for bags and purses
made it worth while to shoot alligators in large num-
bers, and even to capture them alive, and start
‘alligator farming’ much as one would do with cattle
or sheep. The alligators, however, lived on the
water-voles, and the result of their captivity or de-
222 REPTILES
struction was a plague of rodents, which nearly ruined
the agriculturists. The agriculturists thereupon made
the matter a political one, and thus it has come about
that the Government of Florida has decreed a close
time for A. mzsszsseppzensts.
The crocodiles are found not Spin in Africa and
Southern Asia, but in tropical Australia and Central
America and the West Indies. They have a longer
head than the alligator, but their snout is much
broader and shorter than that of the gharials. Their
teeth are not regular, and while the first tooth in the
lower jaw bites into a pit, the fourth bites into a
notch or groove. The largest species (C. forosus) is
found in India and Australia, and is said to occa-
sionally exceed twenty feet in length. The African
crocodile (C. zz/otécus) is almost as large. The Indian
crocodile has been seen to hunt in packs. Mr. E. C.
Buck relates an instance of this which he observed
at the mouth of a small stream leading from some
inland lakes to the Ganges. ‘Towards dusk at the
same moment every one of them left the bank on
which they were lying, or the deep water in which
they were swimming, and formed a line across the
stream, which was about twenty yards wide. They had
to form a double line, as there was not room for all
in a single line. They then swam slowly up the
shallow stream, driving the fish before them, and
I saw two or three fish caught before they dis-
appeared.’
OPHIDIA.—The first thing that strikes one on
looking at a snake is that it has no visible limbs ; but
a moment’s consideration will show that the absence
THE TIGER SNAKE OF AUSTRALIA
224 REPTILES
of limbs is no guide to classification, inasmuch as there
are fishes without limbs, and amphibians without
limbs, and even lizards without limbs. Asa matter of
fact, too, the pythons have rudimentary hind legs. A
snake is very much of a vertebrate—in some species
there are 400 vertebre—and so quick is he in
the use of his ribs that, as Sir Richard Owen says,
ZEAE
LON)
oS |
dle? We
WIHAG
ef Yip
aS ips
ik if
SKELETON OF A PYTHON
‘he can outclimb the monkey, outswim the fish, out-
leap the zebra, outwrestle the athlete, and crush the
tiger. This mode of rib progression is not difficult
to understand. ‘When a part of their body,’ says
Mr. Boulenger, ‘has found some projection of the
ground which affords it a point of support, the ribs,
alternately of one and the other side, are drawn more
SNAKES 22
closely together, thereby producing alternate bends of
the body on the corresponding side. The hinder
portion of the body being drawn after, some part of
it finds another support on the rough ground or
a projection, and the anterior bends being stretched
in a straight line, the front part of the body is
propelled in consequence.’ In short, the ‘soundless,
causeless march of sequent rings,’ as Ruskin calls it,
is an exceedingly rapid wriggle.
A snake’s heart has three chambers ; his teeth are
~ not fitted into sockets, but look as if they were mere
projections of the jawbone, and in some cases are
quite rudimentary. His tongue is forked and retracted
into a sheath; his fang, when he has one, is quite a
different thing, being a long tooth in the front of the
upper jaw having a hole down it through which he
can squirt the poison when he strikes.
The one thousand six hundred species of snakes
are divisible into four groups—the burrowing snakes,
the harmless snakes, the poisonous snakes, and the
vipers. The burrowing snakes (Zyphlopide) have
teeth in one jaw only, and are generally smaller than
earthworms. They are found in Europe, Asia, Africa,
America, and Australia, but no one but a naturalist
takes the slightest notice of them. The vipers attract
much more attention, owing to the perfection of their
poisoning apparatus. The group includes the rattle-
snakes (Crotalide), which are distinguishable from the
true vipers by the pit between the eyeand the nostril,
and by the rattle on the tail, which is apparently
formed of epidermic remnants of previous skins. The
vipers are chiefly African; the rattlesnakes—there
P
226 REPTILES
are twenty-three species of them—are exclusively
American. The word viper is a contraction of Vzvz-
para, the name given to the animal because its young
are born alive, the eggs being hatched in the oviduct.
The poisonous snakes, as distinct from the vipers,
comprise the cobras, coral-snakes, and sea-snakes.
THE RATTLESNAKE
Some of the sea-snakes are twelve feet long; they
live all their lives in the Indian and Pacific Oceans,
between the tropics, feeding on fish, and are as easily
recognisable by their paddle-shaped tails as the Crotalz
by their rattles, and they are, if anything, more
poisonous. The coral-snakes are chiefly Australian ;
THE COBRA 227
they are pirates in the guise of merchantmen, having
the appearance of harmless snakes, but being in reality
most venomous. The hamadryad, which is allied to
the cobras, is one of the few snakes that will attack
Ses ee
THE COBRA DI CAPELLO
man without provocation, and the only thing to be
said in its favour is that it feeds on other snakes.
There is one at South Kensington which is thirteen
feet long. The cobras are not exclusively Indian ;
they are also found in Africa, in China, and in Java,
P2
228 REPTILES
and everywhere inspire the same terror among the
natives.
The harmless snakes include the great anaconda,
which is thirty feet long—the largest of the boas,
larger even than Boa constrictor, The boas are all
South American; in the Old World they are repre-
sented by the pythons, or rock-snakes; several
genera of the Pythonide being Australian. The
pythons can swim as well as climb, and some of them
are four-and-twenty feet long. They none of them
poison their prey ; they kill it by coiling round it and
squeezing it. Among the other colubrine snakes are
our own smooth snake and grass snake.
LACERTILIA.—The lizards have been described
as tailed reptiles having legs; but the legs and the
tail are not to be trusted to, for in some cases a lizard
will jerk off his tail and eat it for want of a meal, and
find no difficulty in growing another ; and if he loses
a leg he can in time replace it. The legs of the
lizards are of every degree: there are lizards with
five claws, lizards with four claws, lizards with three
claws, lizards with two claws, lizards with one claw,
lizards even with no claws or legs at all. There are
over 1,500 lizards altogether—the lizards of the
land, of the trees, of the water, even of the sea.
One lizard only, the Mexican Heloderma horridum,
is poisonous, and has fang-like teeth, The mouth
of a snake is expansible, that of a lizard is not;
and while the snakes have no breastbone, and never
more than a trace of a pelvis, the lizards generally
have both girdles, shoulder and hip, more or less
THE MOLOCH LIZARD
230 REPTILES
developed. The gecko lizards have fleshy plates on
their feet, by which they are enabled not only to run
up perpendicular walls, but even hang downwards on
ceilings. The water lizards are over six feet long, and
have a tail like a saw, with which a deep wound can
be made. One lizard (Amblyrhynchus) lives on the
rocks round the Galapagos Islands, and feeds on sea-
weed. The frilled Australian lizard (Chlamydosaurus)
enters into rivalry with the kangaroos, and hops about
on his hind legs; but the most curious Australian lizard
is the particularly harmless J7oloch, which possesses
the most terrifying exterior of any animal on four
legs. The chameleon is said to go to sleep only one
side at a time, which is not an easy matter to prove.
Like several other lizards, it has the power of
changing its colour at will to suit its surroundings.
The Amphisbena is a degenerate lizard, living under-
ground, and very rudimentary in structure ; another
rudimentary lizard is the blindworm, which has no
legs visible outside the skin. One lizard, the tuatera,
or Sphenodon, has an order all to itself, Rhyncho-
cephalia, being the last living representative of a
group at least as old as the Trias, which, according
to Baur, ‘are certainly the most generalised group of
all reptiles, and come nearest in many respects to
that order of reptiles from which all others took their
origin.’ This is the lizard with the rudimentary third
eye, which is represented by the pineal gland in man.
In the Varanus lizards the position of this eye is
marked by a bright scale.
CHELONIA.—The chelonians are the tortoise
TORTOISES 231
and turtles, distinguishable enough from the other
reptiles by their armour alone. There are four
groups of them, the sea turtles, the fresh-water turtles,
the fresh-water tortoises, and the land _ tortoises.
There are two groups of sea turtles, the hard-shelled
ones and the leathery ones. The leathery ones are a
very old group, but are now represented by only one
species, Dermochelys coriacea, which is occasionally
over six feet long, and is found in most temperate and _
tropical seas, being inso many respects peculiar that
some assign it to a special order devoted to itself and
its long line of ancestors. If we admit this order,
Athecaia, all the other chelonians will go to Testaudt-
nata, and give no difficulty in sortation, for the
marine turtles have feet like paddles ; the freshwater
turtles have webbed feet with sharp claws on the
three inner digits like the crocodile, and their upper
shells or carapaces are covered with skin; the fresh-
water tortoises have a plated carapace and long sharp
claws to their feet ; and the land tortoises have club-
shaped feet with blunt claws.
The land tortoises do not eat cockroaches or
vermin, but are vegetarians. Some of them, like
Testudo mauritania, sold in the streets, are but a few
inches long ; others, like those of the Galapagos and
Mascarene Islands, are giants. They all have a
domed carapace, which in the larger species can be
pierced with a knife when alive. At South Kensington
there is a land tortoise, brought home by Captain
Cookson from Aldabra in 1875, which is known to have
been more than eighty years old and to have weighed
nearly eight hundredweight. The fresh-water tor-
232 REPTILES
toises include a large number of species that can
live as well on land. The most aquatic of them are
the alligator terrapins of North America, which have
a long crested tail like a crocodile ; another remark-
able citizen of the United States is the box-tortoise,
who has his lower shell hinged, so that he can shut
himself up with a lid. There is one fresh-water
Zz
if esate
THE MATAMATA
tortoise, Emmys orbicularts, found in Europe now as
far north as Berlin, which in the past used to live in
our fen-lands.
One species of this group, the bearded matamata
of South America, is about three feet in length,
and swims with its neck projecting, so as to strike
at anything that may come along, and he has
SEA TURTLES 233
been seen to catch birds and fish, so quick is he in
movement. The fresh-water turtles have a much
flatter shell, and they are all carnivorous in habit and
tropical in habitat. Their shell is covered with skin,
and their jaws have fleshy lips, and their snout ends
in a tube, so that they can breathe with everything
but the tip of their nose under water. The sea
turtles are of more importance than all the rest from
a commercial point of view. One of them is the
hawk’s bill, whose epidermic plates furnish the
tortoiseshell that is made into combs and used so
much for inlaying, the best of which is imported into
China from Celebes. Another is the green turtle,
Chelone viridis, whose fate, both clear and thick, is
soup ; his carapace or ‘upper shell’ yielding ‘cali-
pash,’ his ‘under shell’ or plastron yielding ‘calipee.’
All the marine turtles are edible, both in flesh and
eggs, but while C. wrzdzs is especially associated
with the alderman, the others are only fully appre-
ciated by the shipwrecked sailor. All the chelonians
lay eggs, most of them having hard calcareous
shells, and all of them are left to be hatched by the
sun.
The chelonians are a very old family—their repre-
sentatives have been found as deep in the far past as
the Permian ; but, indeed, all the reptiles have long
pedigrees. They used literally to swarm on the face
of the earth, and if we were merely to describe at any
length the many species of the five orders-—Axomo-
dontia, Sauropterygia, Ichthyopterygea, Dinosauria,
Oruithosauria—now only known as fossils, we should
more than fill this book.
234
CHAPTER IV
AMPHIBIANS
Ir is not an easy task to draw the frontier line
between the birds and the reptiles, but it is still more
difficult to separate the amphibia from the fishes.
The amphibia and the reptiles used to be grouped
together, but between them in their living forms a
great gulf is fixed. The reptiles breathe by lungs
all their life, the amphibia breathe by gills in their
youth ; while some of them breathe by gills all along,
and some of them take to lung-breathing in their
mature age.
The amphibians are a very old class. They were
numerous on the earth as long ago as the formation
of the coal measures. They are now generally con-
sidered as divisible into four well-marked orders, one
of which, Stegocephala, is extinct. The three living
orders are: Hcaudata, without tails; Caudata, with
tails ; and Agoda, without either tails or limbs. The
first two of these used to bear the names of Anxoura
and Urvodela, but these are now discarded. The
Apoda are occasionally called Gymunophiona, just as
the Stegocephala are perhaps as well known as the
Labyrinthodontia. Yet one other change in nomen-
FROGS AND TOADS 235
clature which should be noted, and that is the
abandonment of the old designation of the class,
Batrachia, for the more appropriate Amphzbza.
ECAUDATA.—This is the highest order, and
it consists of the frogs and toads and species close
akin to them. There are over 1,000 species of
these tailless genera, which are to be found almost
everywhere, except in the polar regions. They vary
in size from Rana Guppyt, nearly a foot over all,
found in the Solomon Islands, down to the tiny
tree-frogs. Some frogs have no tongue; to this
group belongs the Surinam toad (Pzpa americana), in
which the eggs are placed by the male in cells on
the female’s back, where they stay until their
metamorphosis is complete. This toad, like all the
Pipide, is toothless, whereas the other tongueless
toads have teeth in the upper jaw; one of them,
Xenopus levis, living in tropical Africa, having a ten-
tacle extending backwards on each side of the head.
The Bufonide are the true toads. They have
no teeth in the upper jaw, and the sacral vertebra
is hatchet-shaped. One of the group (Wototrema
marsupiatum) may be called a marsupial, for the
female has a pouch into which the ova are introduced
as soon as they are laid, and where they remain
until they are hatched. One of these toads was
found by Mr. Whymper on Antisana, over 13,000
feet above the sea. Another worthy of note is the
horned toad (Ceratophrys), which has horns over its
eyes and bony plates in the skin of its back. The
typical genus Bufo has no teeth at all; two out of
236 AMPHIBIANS
some seventy species (B. vulgaris and B. calamtta,
the natterjack) are natives of Britain. Like all the
other toads, they secrete a certain mildly-poisonous
substance in their skin-glands, although there is one
really venomous toad, which is found in Argentina.
The tree-frogs (Hyde) have teeth in their upper
jaw, but are otherwise like the toads in structure.
In the frogs (Ranzd@) the sacral vertebra is not
dilated, and there are generally teeth in the upper
jaw. As there are two toads in this country, so
are there two frogs: one (Rana temporaria) said to
be native, the other (2. esculenta) found mostly in
Norfolk, said to have been acclimatised from the
Continent, and distinguishable from the common
species by the absence of the black patch on the
side of the head. The frog undergoes many changes
before he reaches maturity. The chief stages, as
_far as externals are concerned, are shown in our
illustration. At 1 we have the egg as just laid ;
at 2 we have it when the water has made its way
in through the enclosing membrane and distended
it, so as to leave the egg plenty of room; at 3 we
have the young, after the egg has been laid about ten
days, just before he is hatched; at 4 we have him
about four days afterwards, as he makes his first
appearance in the world, consisting apparently of
only tail and head—that is, a tailed-poll, or tadpole,
with gills on his neck; at 5 he has got a mouth,
for up to now he has lived without one; at 6 he
has got his front legs and is losing his gills; at 7
he has got his hind legs, he is working his lungs,
and beginning to feed on his tail. As the supply it
FROGS 237
affords becomes exhausted, the tadpole begins to look
about for something else to feed on, and, suddenly
changing his habits, becomes a carnivore instead of
the vegetarian he has hitherto been. As he has
changed in diet, so does he change in figure. His
I 2
2
°
DEVELOPMENT OF THE FROG
intestine becomes shorter, his liver and stomach
grow bigger, his abdomen shrinks, his tail shortens
up, and finally it disappears altogether and he is an
unmistakable frog. We have said ‘he’ all through
but, as a matter of fact, he is neither he nor she in
238 AMPHIBIANS
particular, but can be made either according to the
food that is discoverable. Naturally the sexes are
in about equal proportions, but by feeding young
tadpoles on beef and frog-flesh it has been found
possible to turn nine out of ten of them into females.
The frogs, as a rule, have ten vertebrz, but Pipa
has only eight. The skeleton is peculiar from the
enormous development of the pelvis, at the upper
end of which comes the hump on the frog’s back.
The bones of the fore-arm and shank are in each
case anchylosed to form a single bone. A frog has
no movable ribs, and hence the gulp with which it
breathes. In fact, it swallows the air much as if it
were water, so that it is possible to suffocate a frog
by merely holding its mouth open. A good deal of
respiration is also done by the skin, and hence if you
butter a frog you cause its death.
CAUDATA.—These are the tailed amphibians,
and there are more than 100 species of them.
Three of these are found in Britain—the crested
newt (Molge cristata), the smooth newt (WZ. vulgaris),
and the palmated newt (7. galmata), all of which live
in the water during spring and summer, and on land
during autumn and winter. Like the salamanders,
they lose their gills before they reach maturity ;
one species, however, the axolotl, retains its gills
throughout. The Salamandride have eyelids, the
Amphiumide have not; they are eel-like creatures,
with small limbs almost at the extreme ends of
their long bodies, and they lose their gills during
metamorphosis, but retain the slit in adult life.
°
SALAMANDERS 239
Proteus and Szren breathe by gills all through life, .
and have no maxillary bones; Szrez has no hind
legs. Proteus anguinus is a long white creature with
feathery gills, which lives in the caves of Carniola
all in darkness, and has only rudiments of eyes. The
largest of the Caudata—and, indeed, the largest of the
living amphibia—is the gigantic salamander of Eastern
Asia, which is over four feet long.
APODA.—In this order there are nearly forty
species, all of them belonging to the Cecilide:
burrowing creatures, like worms, without limbs, or
girdles, or tail, and with rudimentary eyes and ten-
tacles, most of them hatched from eggs, one, at least,
of them being born alive. They are all found in
the tropics—some in Asia, some in Africa, some in
America—most of them spending their lives buried
in the mud; some of them living in water; all of
them more or less of a puzzle to the species-maker,
and chiefly interesting as ‘links’ or ‘intermediates.’
Perhaps the most remarkable of the group is
Icthyophis, which lays its eggs in a hole in damp
earth, and then coils itself around them to protect
them until they are hatched.
240
CHAPTER V
FISHES
THE fishes form the lowest class of vertebrated
animals. They all have gills, by which they breathe
the oxygen in the water, and they all breathe ex-
clusively by gills, except one order of them, in which
the air-bladder is used as a lung. It is now cus-
tomary to divide the class into four orders: the
teleostean, or bony fishes, to which the great bulk
of our food fishes belong; the ganoid, or armoured
fishes, like the sturgeon; the dipnoid, or mud-fishes,
the double-breathers, like the Queensland barra-
munda; and the cartilaginous fishes, like the sharks
and rays.
TELEOSTEI—If we say that these are the
typical fishes, like the perch, it will save us a lengthy
definition. They are conveniently divisible into six
groups, of which the perch, the wrasse, the turbot,
the salmon, the sea-horse, and the globe-fish may be
taken as representatives. They all of them, except
the last, have comb-like gills. The first four have
movable upper jaws; the first two have spinous rays
on the fins, the next two have no spinous rays; in
PERCHES 241
the first the bones of the lower pharynx are separate,
in the second they are united; in the fourth the
ventral fins are posterior ; in the third they are either
missing or placed on the throat. or breast.
Combining these distinctive details, we shall find
that the species of our first division have comb-like
gills; that their premaxilla and upper jaw are
movable; that. they have spinous rays on their
dorsal, anal, and ventral fins; and that their lower
pharynx bones are generally separate. At the head
of these comes the perch (Perca fluviatilis), which is
widely distributed over Europe, Northern Asia, and
Northern America, and which, when full grown, may
attain a length of eighteen inches, though most
familiar to us as about half the size. There is one of
the perch family, Mzcroperca, which when full grown
is only an inch and a half long. The bass (Labrar)
is also in this group, as are the pike-perches (Luczo-
perca), some of which may reach four feet in length.
The sea-perches (Sevranus) run to over seven feet
long in some of their species. Another group consists
of the red mullets, not the grey ones, distinguishable
by their flattened bodies, large thin scales, feeble
teeth, and the two long erectile ‘barbels’ at the
mouth. Next to them come the sea-breams, re-
cognisable at a glance by their flattish, oblong bodies
and large eyes, but chiefly characterised by their
peculiar teeth ; for they have cutting teeth in front
of the jaws or else lateral molars, and sometimes they
have both. To us the most familiar species is the
shad (Pagellus centrodontus) ; but the largest of the
group is Pagrus unicolor, the New Zealand snapper,
Q
242 FISHES
which is over three fect long. Another kindred group
consists of the eccentric, brightly coloured coral fishes,
with short, deep bodies, in which the scales are so
thick on the fins that the body line is quite obscured.
One of the most noteworthy of this group is the
archer-fish (Zoxotes jaculator), which catches insects
by shooting drops of water at them, and so making
them fall into the stream. This fish is about seven
inches long, and he can shoot five feet high, very
seldom missing his aim. There are other species
which have acquired the same curious habit. Next
to them are placed the scorpzenid fishes, which have
appendages about them like fronds of seaweed, in
which they hide and with which they tempt smaller
fishes to destruction. Then come the gurnards, which
have armed heads, and in the esculent genus, 7vig/a,
have the so-called ‘fingers’ as organs of locomotion
as well as of touch. Another genus of this group is
Dactylopierus, which comprises the handsomest of the
fishes that are enabled to take such long leaps out
of the water on their pectoral fins as to be called
flying-fishes. The next step gives us the weevers,
well known and hated by all fishermen for their
poisonous spines, one of which is on the operculum,
or gill-cover. The next takes us to the Scenzde,
including the maigre and the drum, and the next to
the Polynemzde, with the curious tactile organs form-
ing a detached portion of their pectoral fin. Close
akin to them is the West Indian barracuda, which
reaches eight feet in length, and is voracious enough
to attack man.
The mackerels have a higher body temperature
THE SWORD-FISH 243
than any other fishes, and are important contributors
to the food supply of man. They abound in all the
temperate and tropical seas except, curiously enough,
on the American side of the South Atlantic, where
no species of Scomber has yet been found. They
may be looked upon as the hawks of the sea, preying
ceaselessly upon other fishes, chasing them for
enormous distances at high speeds. The biggest of
the group is, perhaps, the Mediterranean tunny,
which has been found even as far afield as the coasts
of Tasmania, and which frequently reaches ten feet
in length. The albacore belongs to this group, as
also do the John Dory, the sucking-fishes, and the
Coryphene—the ‘dolphins’ that hunt the flying-fish,
and turn to such beautiful colours in their death-
throes. The clumsy opah, or king-fish, also belongs
to this group.
The horse-mackerels belong to another group—the
Carangide—which includes the yellow-tails and the
pilot-fish that accompany the sharks, and which the
sharks do not eat because they are not quick enough
to catch them. Another and an even more numer-
ous group are the sword-fishes, some of which are
fifteen feet long. The sword-fish is the particular foe
of the whale, and is supposed to attack boats and
ships owing to his mistaking them for cetaceans.
In the Dreadnought trial in 1864—an action brought
against underwriters for damage said to have been
caused by a sword-fish—many instances of their
attacks were given in evidence by Sir Richard Owen
and Frank Buckland. It appeared that a sword-fish
had been caught by the crew and had broken away
Q2
244 FISHES
again, and that the same evening the ship sprang a
leak, which leak, the owners asserted, was caused by
a revengeful thrust from the angry fish! Against
this the scientific witnesses deposed that, though a
sword-fish frequently pierces a ship’s hull, he never
gets his blade out again. The roughness of the
underside of the jaw forbids its extraction. He has
to break it off and leave it behind him, to die, pro-
bably, in the attempt. An instance was cited in
which the fish completely perforated the vessel’s side
and poked his nose into the passenger’s berth. An
even more remarkable case is recorded of the driving
powers of the Xzphzas. H.M.S. Leopard was once
pierced by a fish through an inch of sheathing, three
inches of plank, and four-and-a-half inches of solid
timber, eight-and-a-half inches of the sword being
thus imbedded—-a record capped, Yankee-like, by
the Hon. Josiah Robbins, who relates that the ship
Fortune was struck by a sword-fish, which drove right
through the copper, through an inch of board
sheathing, three inches of hardwood plank, twelve
inches of white oak, two-and-a-half inches of hard
oak ceiling plank, and, lastly, through the head of an
oil-cask, where it remained immovably fixed, without
spilling the oil. An oldish inhabitant of this world
is Xiphzas gladius. His remains are found as low
down as the chalk. He is one of the largest of the
thorny fishes, and consequently of these mackerel
groups. He has not many near relatives, but one of
them is the singular fan-fish, or sailor-fish of Ceylon,
which hoists its fin like a leg-of-mutton mainsail, and
beats to windward on the surface of the sea.
\
LE
ANE is
THE NEST OF THE TEN-SPINED STICKLEBACK
246 FISHES
In the Gobzde@ the ventral fins are united to form
an adhesive disc, one of the group being the common
lump-sucker (Cyclopterus lumpus). Another curious
group consists of the angler-fishes, which have sea-
weed-like processes around them, and take things
easily on the sea-bottom, dangling tempting baits
over their huge, gaping mouths. The next group
are the blennies, the biggest of them being the sea-
cat, six feet long. Yet another contains the ribbon-
fish, and another the sea-surgeons, armed with a
lancet on each side of their tail; and another, the
Labyrinthict, to which belongs the climbing perch,
which can even scramble up trees. After them come
the Mugilide, or grey mullets, and then the Gastro-
stetd@, or sticklebacks, which, like more than a
dozen other fish, build nests for their young. The
sticklebacks have spines, instead of dorsal fins.
Those with fifteen spines are marine ; the other two,
with ten spines or three spines, live in brackish or
fresh water, the commonest being the three-spined
one. They are the last of the acanthopterygian, or
spiny-rayed fishes, in which the lower bones of the
pharynx are not united. The union of these bones
is the distinctive mark of the next assemblage. Of
this group the most familiar representatives are the
wrasses. These have a single dorsal fin, with a long
spinous and shorter soft portion, and they are mostly
recognisable by their thick lips. Some of them live
on molluscs and crustaceans, and the teeth on their
coalesced pharyngeal bones are specially adapted for
crushing shells, while all the teeth in the jaws are
conical, and arranged in a single series. A few of
HERRING 247
the wrasses are herbivorous, while some live on corals
and echinoderms. They are nearly all highly
coloured, the most brilliant being, perhaps, the parrot
wrasses of the Indian Ocean. ;
In the next assemblage, the Anacanthinz, without
spines in the anal, pelvic, and dorsal fins, are the cods
and the turbots. In the cod group (Gadozdez) are
four families, the most important of which are the
Gadide, which include not only the cod and the
haddock, but the whiting, the pollack, the hake, and
the ling. Thesand-eels used for bait are also gadoids,
as also are the macrurid fishes, found, some of them,
three miles down in the ocean, and represented by
about forty species distributed all over the globe.
To the Pleuronectede belong most of the better-class
flat fishes used as food—those which have the head
twisted so as to bring both eyes on one side, like the
turbot, the sole, the brill, the plaice, the flounder, and
the halibut, which is the largest of all.
In the next category—for there are over 12,000
species of fishes, and we must be brief—the central
group is that of the herring brigade. There are
nearly thirty other groups, all distinguished by
having the fin-rays articulated, the ventral fins, when
present, being without spines, and the air-bladder, if
present, having a pneumatic duct. The cat-fishes
have no scales ; their skins are either naked or pro-
tected by bony scutes. With the exception of the
sturgeon, they are the largest of European fresh-water
fish. In tropical Africa there is an electric cat-fish
(Malapterus) ; in tropical America there is one (Cal/-
achthys) which has huge overlapping shields on its
248 FISHES
body, and builds nests for its young. The carps
(Cyprinidae) have no teeth in the jaws, but make up
for the deficiency by enormous teeth in the throat.
The carp is an acclimatised fish in this country, it
being a native of China, whence it came here by way
of Germany in 1614. The barbel, the roach, the
chub, the tench, the bream, the bleak, the loach, and
the minnow all belong to the same group. Another
group dear to the angler is the Sa/nondde, which in-
cludes not only the salmon, the trout, and the char,
but the smelt and the grayling, and that curious fish
the vendace, found in Britain only in one or two of
the Scottish lakes, but widely distributed over Europe
and North America in several more or less well-
defined species. Of the Hsocide the best known
representative is the pike; of the Scombresocide the
Most conspicuous members are the common flying-
fishes (Exocetus spilopterus) which take huge leaps
of 150 yards or more from the surface of the
tropical seas. To another group (the Osteoglosside)
belongs the largest fresh-water bony fish, the ara-
paima of Guiana, of which there is a specimen at
South Kensington fifteen feet long. And here it
may be fittingly said that these occasional references
to our great Natural History Museum are made not
because it contains the only collection or the best
specimens, which in many cases it does not, but
because it is one of the most generally accessible. A
couple of hours spent in the bays of its entrance hall
will teach the inquirer more natural history than as
many months spent in the mere reading of books.
The next group to that containing the gigantic
SEA-HORSES 249
arapaima is the Chiedde, comprising not only the
herring—that most useful of coast fishes—but the
sprat and the pilchard, otherwise the sardine (Clupea
pilchardus), and that biggest of bloaters, the tarpon
(Megalops thrissoides), as tall as its catcher and looking
taller when photographed five feet in front of him, as
has been done for the purpose of illustration in certain
magazines. Another group, not so far removed, in-
cludes the electric eel of Brazil (Gymnotus electricus) ;
and another (the Murenide) takes in the congers and
other eels, fresh-water and marine. With them we
end the long array of Physostomd.
The Lophobranchiz, our fifth assemblage, need
not detain us long. They consist chiefly of the pipe-
fishes and sea-horses. The flippocampus, or sea-
horse, is merely a bony pipe-fish, some six or eight
inches long at his best, with tufted gills and flattened
body, and: having his scales joined in ridges, with
their three angles raised into a spine. He is known
in twenty slightly differing forms, the commonest
being drevirostris. When alive, swimming upright
in his favourite position in the water, the general
resemblance of his head to that of a horse is very
marked. In dried cabinet specimens the resemblance
is still more striking. A common object is hippo-
campus in our public aquariums, and he is familiar to
all who have voyaged in the Mediterranean. With
the pectoral fins so curiously mimicking ears, and the
peculiarly knowing eyes, one of which is generally
higher than the other, Mr. and Mrs. Seahorse—the
latter distinguished by the possession of an anal fin—
are by no means unpopular, and are the cause of an
250 FISHES
endless fund of amusement as they dart at their prey
from the seaweed stems to which they anchor by
their tails until they are well within range of their
victims.
With the Plectognatht, whose gills are composed
of small spherical lobes, we reach an assemblage of
eccentricities that conclude the long array of bony
fishes. Here we get the file-fishes, which saw off the
coral and chisel holes in the hard shells of the
oysters ; here we have the coffer-fishes, who seem to
struggle through life in a peculiarly angular mosaic
greatcoat ; here we have the globe-fishes, who puff
themselves out into balls, and stick out their enor-
mous spines like caltrops, as if preparing to receive
cavalry ; and here we have the sun-fishes, which look
all head, with a frill round the neck, and seem to
have left their bodies at home for alteration or
repair.
GANOIDE/.—This order had a glorious past,
but is now represented by about seven genera, of
which the chief are those containing the sturgeon
and the bony pike. They are all armoured with
thick, hard scales, and their internal skeleton is, as
a tule, to a certain extent, cartilaginous. One of
them (Lepzdosteus), the bony pike, has the vertebra
convex in front and hollow behind, being thereby
more reptilian than any other fish. This species, also
known as the gar-pike, is found in Cuba and tem-
perate America. It is about five feet in length,
armoured in thick, hard, lozenge-shaped scales, which
look like polished bone; its long, narrow snout has
THE DOUBLE-BREATHERS 251
the upper lip longer than the lower, and the tail is
heterocercal—that is, it has one lobe larger than the
other, the backbone extending into the larger lobe—
altogether, this voracious pike is just such a fish as
one would expect to find swimming out of a-sand-
stone bed. The sturgeons are much more lightly
protected, their armour being represented by de-
tached dermal plates of true bone. It is generally
admitted that the bony fishes were derived from the
ganoids through certain extinct forms.
PIPNOI—This is another order with a long
pedigree, one of its genera (Ceratodus) having per-
sisted up to now since Permian times. Their teeth
are remarkable for consisting of merely a pair of
large molars in both jaws, and a pair of vomerine
teeth ; but the main characteristics of the order are the
amphibian nature of the heart, and the fact that the
swim-bladder acts as a single or double lung; in
short, the dipnoi, in many respects, clearly foreshadow
the amphibians. The barramunda (Ceratodus For-
stert) has red flesh, like a salmon, and is often called
the Dawson salmon, from having been found in the
Queensland river of that name. It is a curious-
looking fish, almost oblong in shape, with short, eel-
like tail and flipper-like lower fins, the fore-pair being
close up to the gills) The other genera are the
somewhat common African Protopterus, of which
there are living examples in the Reptile House at the
London Zoological Gardens, and the Lepilosiren of
the Amazon, one of the rarest and most ancient-
looking of modern fishes. Ceratodus, as we have
252 FISHES
hinted, is the oldest living genus; but there were
dipnoids in Devonian days.
ELASMOBRANCHII—These are the cartila-
ginous fishes ; the least specialised and most ancient
of all. There is now in Japanese waters the oldest
of living fishes—a shark named Chlamydoselachus,
with direct ancestors of Devonian age ; but the order
goes even further back, for we find it represented in
Upper Silurian strata) The only bony structures
worth mentioning in the order are the teeth and
scales, the skeleton being almost entirely gristly or
cartilaginous; and here it is we find the placoid
scales, or skin teeth, which are plates tipped with
enamel and based with bone. Some of these fishes
use egg-purses for their ova, while others are vivi-
parous. There are three main divisions of the order
—the chimeras, the sharks, and the rays. The
chimeras have but one external gill opening, and
that is covered by a fold of the skin. They furnish
the intermediate forms between the sharks and the
ganoids, the best known of them being the king ot
the herrings (Chimera monstrosa), a naked fish of
surpassing ugliness. The sharks and rays have trans-
verse mouths and from five to seven gill-openings,
sharks having them on the sides of the body, while
the rays have them underneath—the sharks being of
the usual fish-like form, while the rays are flat, like
the skate. Sharks have no scales, their skin being
covered with the calcified papillee which, when small,
distinguish the ‘shagreen’ of commerce.
The blue sharks (Carcharias) are occasionally
THE HAMMER HEADED SHARK
254 FISHES
thirty feet long; the hammerheads (Zygena), with
the curious right and left extensions of the head,
are smaller but no less formidable. The Carcharodon
may be forty feet long, but from a number of teeth
dredged up by the Challenger, some of which were four
inches across the base, it is supposed that a species
of the genus over seventy feet long must be either
living or only recently extinct. The thresher shark
(Alopecias), with an enormous development of the
main lobe of the tail, is about fifteen feet long, and .
_ is as harmless to man as the basking shark (Selache
maxima), which never attacks man unless in self-
defence. The cestracionts, or Port Jackson sharks,
are of great interest as being the direct descendants
of primary forms, though only three genera out of
some five and twenty have as yet been found living.
With the smaller sharks are grouped the dog-fishes,
that by way of the angel-fish and the Pristiophoride
lead on to the rays, the gap being filled by the saw-
fishes. ;
The saw-fish has the long body of a shark and
the ventral gill openings of a ray. His saw, like the
sword of xiphias, is a long, flattened, bony snout,
but it is double-edged and covered with a rough skin,
and its score or more of serrations on each side may
be looked upon as its false or pioneer teeth, the true
teeth within its mouth being flat and grinding. The
body may be a dozen feet long, and to this is to be
added the saw, which may measure five. This saw
exists in a rudimentary form in all the rays. It is
smooth when the fish is young, the teeth appearing
as the animal advances in age. It is well known as
RAYS 250
a weapon amongst the Polynesian islanders, and, like
the horn of the narwhal and the sword of the xiphias,
is frequently found buried in the timbers of ocean-
going ships. Notwithstanding its name (Pristis
antiquorunt), the saw-fish is not as old in time as the
sword-fish, for it first appears in the London clay.
The electric rays (7 orpedinide) bear a familiar
name in modern warfare. There are six species of
torpedo, who all kill or stun their prey by an electric
shock, three of them being natives of the Mediter-
ranean. The true rays are found in all temperate
seas, though most of them as yet come from the
northern hemisphere. On our coasts the most fre-
quent forms are the thornback (Raza clavata) and
the common skate (R. datis). Some of the skates
are giants, measuring seven feet across. The sting-
rays belong to another group, the Zrygonide. The
eagle-rays belong to yet. another, the Mylhobatide,
these having the greatest fin-spread of any of the
fishes, specimens measuring twenty feet in width
being on record. They are the last of the living
things called vertebrate.
With them we end our survey of the aristocrats
of animal life. Below them are the great majority
from whom it is impossible to separate the higher
classes, and from whom, through many a transition,
they have undoubtedly risen in that great system of
orderly growth under which Creation has attained its
present state. Such a thing as chance or isolation in
their history is inadmissible. As Professor Marshall
says, in his Vertebrate - Embryology, ‘ All animals
256 FISHES
living, or that ever have lived, are united together by
blood relationship of varying nearness or remoteness;
and every animal now in existence has a pedigree
stretching back, not merely for ten or a hundred
generations, but through all geologic time since life
first commenced on the earth. The study of develop-
ment has revealed to us that each animal bears the
mark of its ancestry, and is compelled to discover its
parentage in its own development; the phases through
which an animal passes in its progress from the egg
to the adult are no accidental freaks—no mere matters
of developmental convenience, but represent more
or less closely, in more or less modified manner, the
successive ancestral stages through which the present
condition has been acquired.’
But, seek as we may, there will remain the inevi-
table Unknown, and in all, through all, and over all,
the manifestation of that Overruling Intelligence,
unresting from everlasting to everlasting, of Him of
whom it is said :—
‘He sendeth forth springs into the valleys ;
They run among the mountains ;
They give drink to every beast of the field ;
The wild asses quench their thirst.
By them the fowl of the heaven have their habitation,
They sing among the branches.
He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle,
And herb for the service of man :
That He may bring forth food out of the earth,
And bread that strengtheneth man’s heart.
O Lord, how manifold are Thy works !
In wisdom hast Thou made them all. !
! Psalm civ. (R.V.)
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ae Te
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; fesus and the Woman |
| of Samaria. \
: Hr The Brazen Serpent.
15 ThePeart of Great Price
16 Finding the Lost Sheep.
*17 The Conversion of Saut.
18 the. Pool of Bethesda.
19 ae anaes ofthe Ten j
1 The Good Shephe
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4 Jesus Bless saing the
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5 Jesus in the 8
é Jesus amongst
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7 Hatett the — Widow"
Son
Fi *8 The Retuen of the P "0-
| digal,
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: Silas in Prispr. q
Th wae hid én the
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23, David playing before
ays Saul, H
yea Dittle Samuel. i
9 Blind Bartimeus.
*1o The Good Samaritan,
*11 Daniel in the atoms?
f Den, *os Abraham and Isaac. :
12 The Pharisee and the | *26 Joseph Sold by his
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