PIG-TAILED MONKEY CATCHING A FLY.
Most of the smaller monkeys, as well as the baboons, are fond of eating insects. Beetles, white ants, and flies are eagerly sought and devoured.
THE LEMURS.
The South American monkeys, with their squirrel-like forms and fur, are followed by a beautiful and interesting group of creatures, called the Lemurs, with their cousins the Lorises, Maholis, and Pottos. Their resemblance to monkeys is mainly in their hands and feet. These are real and very highly developed hands, with proper thumbs. The second toe on the hind foot nearly always terminates in a long, sharp claw. "Elia," the Indian naturalist, who kept them as pets, noticed that they used this to scratch themselves with. Some of them have the finger-tips expanded into a sensitive disk, full of extra nerves. Lemur means "ghost." Unlike the lively squirrels and monkeys, they do not leave their hiding-places till the tropical darkness has fallen on the forest, when they seek their food, not by descending to the ground, but by ascending to the upper surface of the ocean of trees, and again, at the first approach of dawn, seek refuge from the light in the recesses of some dark and hollow trunk. The Ring-tailed Lemur is as lively by day as night; but most of the race are so entirely creatures of darkness that the light seems to stupefy them. When wakened, they turn over like sleeping children, with the same inarticulate cries and deep, uneasy sighs. But at night most are astonishingly active; they fly from tree to tree, heard, but invisible; so that the natives of Madagascar doubt whether they are not true lemures, the unquiet ghosts of their departed dead.
Though the lemurs are here treated apart from the other animals of Madagascar, it will be obvious that they are a curious and abnormal tribe. This is true of most of the animals of that great island, which has a fauna differing both from that of the adjacent coast of Africa and from that of India or Australia. In the Fossa, a large representative of the Civets, it possesses a species absolutely unlike any other. The Aye-aye is also an abnormal creature. Nor must it be forgotten that Madagascar was until recently the home of some of the gigantic ground-living birds. But, after all, none of its inhabitants are more remarkable than its hosts of lemurs, some of which are to be met with in almost every coppice in the island. There are also many extinct kinds.
Exquisite fur, soft and beautifully tinted, eyes of extraordinary size and colour (for the pupil shuts up to a mere black line by day, and the rest of the eye shows like a polished stone of rich brown or yellow or marble-grey), are the marks of most of the lemurs. But there are other lemur-like creatures, or "lemuroids," which, though endowed with the same lovely fur, like softest moss, have no tails. The strangest of all are two creatures called the Slender Loris and the Slow Loris. The slender loris, which has the ordinary furry coat of the lemurs, and no tail, moves on the branches exactly as does a chameleon. Each hand or foot is slowly raised, brought forward, and set down again. The fingers then as slowly close on the branch till its grasp is secure. It is like a slow-working mechanical toy. Probably this is a habit, now instinctive, gained by ages of cautiously approaching insects. But the result is to give the impression that the creature is almost an automaton.
Photo by L. Medland, F.Z.S.] [North Finchley.
RING-TAILED LEMUR.
This lemur is often kept as a domestic animal, and allowed to run about the house like a cat.