[Jaguar.]

About forty species of monkeys, or one half of the New World forms, inhabit the Valley of the Amazon. Wallace, in a residence of four years, saw twenty-one species—seven with prehensile and fourteen with non-prehensile tails. They all differ from the apes of the other hemisphere. While those of Africa and Asia (Europe has only one) have opposable thumbs on the fore feet as well as hind, uniformly ten molar teeth in each jaw, as in man, and generally cheek-pouches and naked collosities, the American monkeys arc destitute of the two latter characteristics. None of them are terrestrial, like the baboon; all (save the marmosets) have twenty-four molars; the thumbs of the fore-hands are not habitually opposed to the fingers (one genus, Ateles, "the imperfect," is thumbless altogether); the nostrils open on the sides of the nose instead of beneath it, as in the gorilla, and the majority have long prehensile tails. They are inferior in rank to the anthropoids of the Old World, though superior to the lemurs of Madagascar. They are usually grouped in two families—Marmosets and Cebidre. The former are restless, timid, squirrel-like lilliputs (one species is only seven inches long), with tails not prehensile—in the case of the scarlet-faced, nearly wanting. The Barigudos, or gluttons (Lagothrix), are the largest of American monkeys, but are not so tall as the Coaitas. They are found west of Manáos. They have more human features than the other monkeys, and, with their woolly gray fur, resemble an old negro. There are three kinds of howlers (Mycetes)—the red or mono-colorado of Humboldt, the black, and the M. beelzebub, found only near Pará. The forest is full of these surly, untamable guaribas, as the natives call them. They are gifted with a voice of tremendous power and volume, with which they make night and day hideous. They represent the baboons of the Old World in disposition and facial angle (30°), and the gibbons in their yells and gregarious habits.[178] The Sapajous (Cebus) are distributed throughout Brazil, and have the reputation of being the most mischievous monkeys in the country. On the west coast of South America there are at least three or four species of monkeys, among them a black howler and a Cebus capucinus. The Coitas, or spider-monkeys, are the highest of American quadrumana. They are slender-legged, sluggish, and thumbless, with a most perfectly prehensile tail, terminating in a naked palm, which answers for a fifth hand. The Indians say they walk under the limbs like the sloth. They are the most common pets in Brazil, but they refuse to breed in captivity. Both Coitas and Barigudos are much persecuted for their flesh, which is highly esteemed by the Indians.

Mr. Bates has called our attention to the arboreal character of a large share of the animals in the Amazonian forest. All the monkeys and bats are climbers, and live in the trees. Nearly all the carnivores are feline, and are therefore tree-mounters, though they lead a terrestrial life. The plantigrade Cercoleptes has a long tail, and is entirely arboreal. Of the edentates, the sloth can do nothing on the ground. The gallinaceous birds, as the cigana and curassow—the pheasant and turkey of the Amazon—perch on the trees, while the great number of arboreal frogs and beetles is an additional proof of the adaptation of the fauna to a forest region. Even the epiphytous plants sitting on the branches suggest this arboreal feature in animal life.

[CHAPTER XXII.]

Life around the Great River.— Origin of the Red Man.— General Characteristics of the Amazonian Indians.— Their Languages, Costumes, and Habitations.— Principal Tribes.— Mixed Breeds.— Brazilians and Brazil.

We come now to the genus Homo. Man makes a very insignificant figure in the vast solitudes of the Amazon. Between Manáos and Pará, the most densely-peopled part of the valley, there is only one man to every four square miles; and the native race takes a low place in the scale of humanity. As the western continent is geologically more primitive than the eastern, and as the brute creation is also inferior in rank, so the American man, in point of progress, seems to stand in the rear of the Old World races. Both the geology and zoology of the continent were arrested in their development. Vegetable life alone has been favored. "The aboriginal American (wrote Von Martius) is at once in the incapacity of infancy and unpliancy of old age; he unites the opposite poles of intellectual life."[179]

We will not touch the debatable ground of the red man's origin, nor inquire whether he is the last remains of a people once high in civilization. But we are tempted to express the full belief that tropical America is not his "centre of creation." He is not the true child of the tropics; and he lives as a stranger, far less fitted for its climate than the Negro or Caucasian. Yet a little while, and the race will be as extinct as the Dodo. He has not the supple organization of the European, enabling him to accommodate himself to diverse conditions. Among the Andean tribes there are seldom over five children, generally but one, in a family; and Bates, speaking of Brazilian Indians, says "their fecundity is of a low degree, and it is very rare to find a family having so many as four children."[180]

While it is probable that Mexico was peopled from the north, it is very certain that the Tupi and Guarani, the long-headed hordes that occupied eastern South America, came up from the south, moving from the Paraguay to the banks of the Orinoco. From the Tupi nation (perhaps a branch of the Guarani) sprung the multitudinous tribes now dwelling in the vast valley of the Amazon. In such a country—unbroken by a mountain, uniform in climate—we need not look for great diversity. The general characters are these: skin of a brown color, with yellowish tinge, often nearly the tint of mahogany; thick, straight, black hair; black, horizontal eyes; low forehead, somewhat compensated by its breadth; beardless; of the middle height, but thick-set; broad, muscular chest; small hands and feet; incurious; unambitious; impassive; undemonstrative; with a dull imagination and little superstition; with no definite idea of a Supreme Being, few tribes having a name for God, though one for the "Demon;" with no belief in a future state; and, excepting civility, with virtues all negative. The semi-civilized along the Lower Amazon, called Tupuyos, seem to have lost (in the language of Wallace) the good qualities of savage life, and gained only the vices of civilization.