GENUS CHEIROMYS.
Another Madagascar Lemuroid remains to be noticed, and it ought to have been described with those of that great island; but the creature is so unlike all the others, and is so manifestly inferior in its Lemuroid character, and peculiar in its construction and habits, that it is necessary to place it at the end of all. Its position in the scale of classification is at the end of the Lemuroida, for although it has many of their anatomical characters, it resembles the Rodents, or Gnawers, in others. It is called
THE AYE-AYE.[143]
This is one of the most remarkable animals in the world, both on account of its peculiar Squirrel shape and Lemur-like construction, as well as on account of its habits. The animal was first kept and described by the traveller Sonnerat, who obtained a male and female from the west coast of Madagascar. He kept them on board ship and fed them on boiled rice for two months, when they died, and he used to remark that they used a finger of each hand to eat with, after the fashion of the Chinese, who use chopsticks. Having shown them to some of the natives of the east coast of the island, they were surprised, and denied that these curious-looking creatures belonged to their part of the country; moreover, they ejaculated “Aye-aye” on seeing them, and thus gave the familiar name to the breed. It is now known that the so-called Aye-Aye chiefly inhabits the forests of bamboos, which are numerous in the interior of the island. They are rare animals, and live a solitary life, or are found in pairs, but they never associate in bands of several individuals. They are essentially nocturnal in their habits, for they sleep all the day long in the thick bunches of leaves of the bamboos in the most impenetrable part of the forests, and they are therefore rarely seen, and are only met with quite by accident. The Aye-Aye feeds on the pith of the bamboos, and on sugar-canes, but it also loves Beetles and their grubs as a change of food. During the dark nights it awakens the echoes of the forest with a kind of plaintive grunting, and jumps from bough to bough, and clambers up the trees with great agility and vivacity, examining the bark of old trees most carefully in order to find its favourite insect-food.
AYE-AYE. (After Owen, Trans. Zool. Soc., but modified.)
As daylight approaches, the Aye-Aye ceases its lively play and forest-roaming, and moves into the sombre shades of the densest foliage; there it avoids the light and the rays of the sun, and placing its head between the fore-feet, and encircling itself with its bushy tail, the now half-torpid creature sleeps on until the evening.
The Aye-Aye is about three feet in length, including the long tail, and there is a half Fox, half Lemur look about it, with a little of the Squirrel. The hind feet at first sight are like those of a Monkey, as are also the limbs; but the hands are not in keeping with the rest, for the fingers are of all kinds of lengths, and the middle one looks as if it were atrophied and wasted. A little care, however, proves that the ears, so widely open and spoon-shaped, and nearly naked, are larger than those of these animals, that the head is really broader than theirs, and that the furthest end of the muzzle surmounts a perfect lip which hides four great front teeth, two above and two below. The tail is a very prominent object, and is longer than the body; it is straight, very bushy, flexible, and is covered with long coarse hairs, being thicker at the end than at the root. All the rest of the body, except the ears, nose, and the palms of the feet and hands, which are naked, is covered with a fur that is dense and furry underneath, and long and hairy at the ends; and it is these long hairs which give the general tint to the animal. The prevailing tint is a deep fuscous approaching to black; there is a little dark-red underneath, and yellow-grey on the throat nearest the head. Everywhere the dark colour is relieved by long scattered white hairs, which are very conspicuous on the back. On the back and tail the hair attains the length of from three to four inches. It has widely-open staring eyes, and whilst it is lively enough in the dark, it looks dazed and stupid in daylight. As if to render the animal more curious than ever, the teats, or mammæ for suckling the young, are not on the breast, but in the lower part of the body, and close to the groins, there being one on each side.
The Aye-Aye, so strangely constructed, has been a great puzzle to naturalists, and there have been many keen debates about its natural history. It is a hundred years since Sonnerat stated that, although the Aye-Aye much resembles a Squirrel, “yet it differs therefrom by some essential characters, being also allied to the Lemur and the Monkey;” and in describing the fore-foot, he specifies the long slender joints of the skeleton-looking middle finger, which the animal, he says, “makes use of to draw out of holes in trees the worms which form its food.” Buffon saw the skin of one of these specimens obtained by Sonnerat, and concluded that it is more closely allied to the genus of Squirrels than to any other, and that it also has more relation to a kind of Jerboa. After describing the hind feet, Buffon remarks that the opposite character of the thumb with the flattened nail separates the Aye-Aye widely from the Squirrel, and that of all animals that have a flat great toe-thumb nail, the Tarsier, a kind of Jerboa, is that which most resembles it. He ranked the Aye-Aye with the Rodents, or Gnawers. Nevertheless, Cuvier considered it to be one of the Squirrels, and by no means ignoring the opposite hind thumb, he still believed it to be an unusual or anomalous kind, but he was greatly led by the belief that the animal gnawed wood invariably for the sake of its only food, the worms and grubs. About the same time a German (Schreber), by examining the limbs, decided that the Aye-Aye was a Lemur, and he called it Lemur psilodactylus, or the “bare-fingered” Lemur; and after a while Cuvier obtained the skull and part of the limb-bones from Sonnerat’s specimen, and examined the first especially. Then the great front teeth of the Aye-Aye, and the space behind them, influenced the great anatomist, who saw that it had the teeth of Gnawers (Rodents), and skull like that of the Quadrumana, so he placed it in the list of doubtful animals. After his time, most anatomists considered the animal to be clearly allied to the Squirrels, and placed it amongst the Rodentia. But in 1859 Owen, from whose works the above notices of the progress of opinion on this subject have been taken, received an important letter from Dr. Sandwith, C. B., and a specimen of the Aye-Aye. The following letter explains the habits, and Owen subsequently described the anatomy of the animal, and placed it in its present position in the classification.
