MANDRILL (CYNOCEPHALUS MAIMON).
PIG-FACED BABOON.
The real baboons are distinguished from the mandrills by a long tail, terminated by a tuft of hair. The great baboon of Senegal (Cynocephalus Sphinx) is by no means devoid of intelligence, and learns many tricks when taught from early youth. His temper, however, is brutal and choleric, though less so than the Chacma (Cynocephalus porcarius), or pig-faced baboon, which is found in the vicinity of Cape Town, among others on the celebrated Table Mountain. Young chacmas are often kept as domestic animals, performing the offices of a mastiff, whom they greatly surpass in strength. Thus they immediately announce by their growling the approach of a stranger, and are even employed for a variety of useful purposes which no dog would be able to perform. Here one is trained to blow the bellows of a smith; there another to guide a team of oxen. When a stream is to be crossed, the chacma immediately jumps upon the back of one of the oxen, and remains sitting till he has no longer to fear the wet, which he loves as little as the cat.
In Abyssinia, Nubia, and South Arabia we find the Derryas (C. Hamadryas), which enjoyed divine honours among the ancient Egyptians. The general colour of the hair is a mixture of light-grey and cinnamon, and in the male that of the head and neck forms a long mane, falling back over the shoulders. The face is extremely long, naked, and of a dirty flesh-colour. This ugly monkey was revered as the symbol of Thoth, the divine father of literature and the judge of man after death. Formerly temples were erected to his honour, and numerous priests ministered to his wants, but now, by a sad change of baboon-fortune, he is shot without ceremony, and his skin pulled over his ears to be stuffed and exhibited in profane museums.
The monkeys of the New World differ still more widely from those of the Old than the copper-coloured Indian from the woolly Negro. One sees at once on comparing them that whole oceans roll between them, that they have not migrated from one hemisphere to another, but belong to two different phases of creation. While the nasal partition of the Old World simiæ is narrow as in man, it is broad without exception in all the American monkeys, so that the nostrils are widely separated and open sideways. The dental apparatus is also different, for while the monkeys of our hemisphere have thirty-two teeth, those of the western world generally possess thirty-six.
The tailless monkeys or apes, and the short-tailed baboons, are peculiar to our hemisphere, and it is only here that we find almost voiceless simiæ, while the American quadrumana are all of them tailed, short-snouted, and generally endowed with stentorian powers. Finally, it would be as useless to look among the western monkeys for cheek-pouches and sessile callosities, as among those of the Old World for prehensile tails.
In the boundless forests of tropical South America, the monkeys form by far the greater part of the mammalian inhabitants, for each species, though often confined within narrow limits, generally consists of a large number of individuals. The various arboreal fruits which the savage population of these immeasurable wilds is unable to turn to advantage, fall chiefly to their share; many of them also live upon insects. They are never seen in the open savannahs, as they never touch the ground unless compelled by the greatest necessity. The trees of the forests furnish them with all the food they require; it is only in the woods that they feel ‘at home’ and secure against the attacks of mightier animals; why then should they quit them for less congenial haunts? For their perpetual wanderings from branch to branch, Nature has bountifully endowed many of them, not only with robust and muscular limbs and large hands, whose moist palms facilitate the seizure of a bough, but in many cases also with a prehensile tail, which may deservedly be called a fifth hand, and is hardly less wonderful in its structure than the proboscis of the elephant. Covered with short hair, and completely bare underneath towards the end, this admirable organ rolls round the boughs as though it were a supple finger, and is at the same time so muscular that the monkey frequently swings with it from a branch like the pendulum of a clock. Scarce has he grasped a bough with his long arms, when immediately coiling his fifth hand round the branch, he springs on to the next, and secure from a fall, hurries so rapidly through the crowns of the highest trees that the sportsman’s ball has scarce time to reach him in his flight.
When the Miriki (Ateles hypoxanthus), the largest of the Brazilian monkeys, sitting or stretched out at full length, suns himself on a high branch, his tail suffices to support him in his aërial resting-place, and even when mortally wounded, he remains a long time suspended by it, until life being quite extinct, his heavy body, whizzing through the air, and breaking many a bough as it descends, falls with a loud crash to the ground.