The Old-World tribes of our tree-climbing relatives are so totally different from those of the American tropics that Humboldt's traveling companion, Bonplant, renounced the theory of a unitary center of creation (or evolution), and maintained that South America must have made a separate though unsuccessful attempt to rise from lemurs to manlike apes and men. Of such as they are, Brazil alone has forty-eight species of monkeys, and Venezuela at least thirty. How shall we account for the fact that not one of the large West Indian islands betrays a vestige of an effort in the same direction?
More monkey-inviting forests than those of southern Hayti can not be found in the tropics, but not even a marmoset or squirrel-monkey accepted the invitation. In an infinite series of centuries not one pair of quadrumana availed itself of the chance to cross a sea gap, though at several points the mainland approaches western Cuba within less than two hundred miles—about half the distance that separates southern Asia from Borneo, where fourhanders of all sizes and colors compete for the products of the wilderness, and, according to Sir Philip Maitland, the "native women avoid the coast jungles for fear of meeting Mr. Darwin's grandfather."
The first Spanish explorers of the Antilles were, in fact, so amazed at the apparently complete absence of quadrupeds that their only explanation was a conjecture that the beasts of the forest must have been exterminated by order of some native potentate, perhaps the great Kubla Khan, whose possessions they supposed to extend eastward from Lake Aral to the Atlantic. The chronicle of Diego Columbus says positively that San Domingo and San Juan Bautista (Porto Rico) were void of mammals, but afterward modifies that statement by mentioning a species of rodent, the hutia, or bush rat, that annoyed the colonists of Fort Isabel, and caused them to make an appropriation for importing a cargo of cats.
Bush rats and moles were, up to the end of the sixteenth century, the only known indigenous quadrupeds of the entire West Indian archipelago, for the "Carib dogs," which Valverde saw in Jamaica, were believed to have been brought from the mainland by a horde of man-hunting savages.
But natural history has kept step with the advance of other sciences, and the list of undoubtedly aboriginal mammals on the four main islands of the Antilles is now known to comprise more than twenty species. That at least fifteen of them escaped the attention of the Spanish creoles is as strange as the fact that the Castilian cattle barons of Upper California did not suspect the existence of precious metals, though nearly the whole bonanza region of the San Joaquin Valley had been settled before the beginning of the seventeenth century. But the conquerors of the Philippines even overlooked a variety of elephants that roams the coast jungles of Mindanao.
Eight species of those West Indian incognito mammals, it is true, are creatures of a kind which the Spanish zoölogists of Valverde's time would probably have classed with birds—bats, namely, including the curious Vespertilio molossus, or mastiff bat, and several varieties of the owl-faced Chilonycteris, that takes wing in the gloom preceding a thunderstorm, as well as in the morning and evening twilight, and flits up and down the coast rivers with screams that can be heard as plainly as the screech of a paroquet. The Vespertilio scandens of eastern San Domingo has a peculiar habit of flitting from tree to tree, and clambering about in quest of insects, almost with the agility of a flying squirrel. There are times when the moonlit woods near Cape Rafael seem to be all alive with the restless little creatures; that keep up a clicking chirp, and every now and then gather in swarms to contest a tempting find, or to settle some probate court litigation. San Domingo also harbors one species of those prototypes of the harpies, the fruit-eating bats. It passes the daylight hours in hollow trees, but becomes nervous toward sunset and apt to betray its hiding place by an impatient twitter—probably a collocution of angry comments on the length of time between meals. The moment the twilight deepens into gloom the chatterers flop out to fall on the next mango orchard and eat away like mortgage brokers. They do not get fat—champion gluttons rarely do—but attain a weight of six ounces, and the Haytian darkey would get even with them after a manner of their own if their prerogatives were not protected by the intensity of their musky odor. The above-mentioned hutia rat appears to have immigrated from some part of the world where the shortness of the summer justified the accumulation of large reserve stores of food, and under the influence of a hereditary hoarding instinct it now passes its existence constructing and filling a series of subterranean granaries. Besides, the females build nurseries, and all these burrows are connected by tunnels that enable their constructors to pass the rainy season under shelter. They gather nuts, belotas (a sort of sweet acorns), and all kinds of cereals, and with their penchant for appropriating roundish wooden objects on general principles would probably give a Connecticut nutmeg peddler the benefit of the doubt.
They also pilfer raisins, and a colony of such tithe collectors is a formidable nuisance, for the hutia is a giant of its tribe, and attains a length of sixteen inches, exclusive of the tail. It is found in Cuba, Hayti, Jamaica, Porto Rico, Antigua, Trinidad, the Isle of Pines, Martinique, and two or three of the southern Bahama Islands, and there may have been a time when it had the archipelago all to itself. The Lucayans had a tradition that their ancestors found it on their arrival from the mainland, and in some coast regions of eastern Cuba it may still be seen basking in the sunlight—
"Sole sitting on the shore of old romance,"
and wondering if there are any larger mammals on this planet.
Its next West Indian congener is the Jamaica rice rat, and there are at least ten species of mice, all clearly distinct from any Old-World rodent, though it is barely possible that some of them may have stolen a ride on Spanish trading vessels from Central America.