"When observed in their native wilds, a party of twenty or thirty of these creatures is generally busily engaged in the search for berries and buds. They are seldom to be seen on the ground, except when they may have descended to recover seeds or fruit which have fallen at the foot of their favourite trees. When disturbed, their leaps are prodigious; but, generally speaking, their progress is made, not so much by leaping, as by swinging from branch to branch, using their powerful arms alternately; and when baffled by distance, flinging themselves obliquely so as to catch the lower boughs of an opposite tree, the momentum acquired by their descent being sufficient to cause a rebound of the branch, that carries them up again, till they can grasp a higher and more distant one, and thus continue their headlong flight. In these perilous achievements, wonder is excited, less by the surpassing agility of these little creatures, frequently encumbered as they are by their young, which cling to them in their career, than by the quickness of their eye, and the unerring accuracy with which they seem almost to calculate the angle at which a descent will enable them to cover a given distance, and the recoil to attain a higher altitude."
IX. PAITAN LANGUR. SEMNOPITHECUS SABANUS.
Semnopithecus sabanus, Thomas, Ann. & Mag. Nat. Hist. (6), xii., p. 230, pl. vii. (head), (1893).
PLATE XXXV.
HOSE'S LANGUR.
Characters.—Allied to S. hosii, S. everetti, and S. thomasi. Body, tail, and limbs grey; forehead with a high vertical median crest, commencing on the brow, black, with some white hairs; superciliary bristles long, black, projected forward over the eyes; hairs of the forehead on each side of the crest, flat against the head, white over the whole crown (with a few black hairs), but darker tipped on the back of the head; sides of the face from the orbits to the ears quite black; occipital hairs directed backward, not forward as in S. thomasi. Chin, sides of neck, throat, and chest greyish, not white as in the allied species. Under side of the body and inner side of the upper arms, and the legs to the ankles white, becoming greyer distally; hands and feet shining black; fore-arms to the wrists, and legs to the ankles, grizzled grey, as also the tail, above and below. Skin of face probably flesh-coloured between and across the orbits and round the cheeks, elsewhere black. Length of body, 23½ inches; tail, 30 inches.
Cranium broader and rounder than in the allied species; the ascending process of the maxillary bones articulating with the frontals, shutting out the former bones from the side of the nasals. In the allied species the skin of the face is nearly, or quite, black all over, and the chin, sides of the neck, the throat, and the chest are pure white.
Distribution.—Paitan, N. Borneo. Discovered by the veteran Bornean traveller Alfred Everett.
X. HOSE'S LANGUR. SEMNOPITHECUS HOSII.