i 4 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



nivora, namely, that of raising their food with the paws toward the 

 mouth, and bowing the head to meet it half-way. The coati and rac- 

 coon will tear the food into fragments, and sticking into it the claws, 

 like an improvised fork, will thus convey it to the mouth. Who ever 

 saw a dog or cat raise its food from the ground, except by its mouth ? 

 Our Nasua, then, has elements of ursine structure, aspect, and habit. 



But this little animal has also something of the appetency, struct- 

 ure, and habit of the swine. Look only at the cut of Nasua asleep, 

 and mark the resemblance of the end of its proboscis to the snout of 

 the hog. The engraving is from a photograph, and gives an admi- 

 rable foreshortening of the organ. We have shown that in function it 

 is identical ; for the animal roots precisely as a hog. Here it looks tow- 

 ard the swine through the peccary, that hog-like animal of its own 

 country. We have also noticed that, in a common recklessness, they 

 the coati and the peccary bear a psychic similitude. Both have a 

 habit of wildly confronting danger, and both have been known to 

 overcome great perils, and to repulse superior enemies, by actual te- 

 merity real sauciness, or sheer effrontery of dash. 



And there is that remarkable proboscis, which actually supplies 

 the generic name an organ so mobile, and so effective, and so facile 

 of disposition and adjustment. Herein, through the tapir, appears an 

 elephantine expression point of relationship. 



Then come those traits so simian that inappeasable inquisitive- 

 ness, and that capacity for quasi-human expedients, and that monkey 

 vice of incessant teasing, and that monkey chattering, expressing terror 

 or distress. It is true that here we seem to stand entirely on meta- 

 physical ground, as we cannot demonstrate any anatomical points of 

 structure related to these traits. And we admit that, in these matters, 

 we have no right to demand conviction unless from logic so formu- 

 lated. Still the traits are there; and we feel that these traits, physi- 

 oo-nomical and psychic, cannot stand unrelated to some important 

 physiological data, which may perhaps place Nasua a little below 

 the Lemurs in rank, through which inchoate monkeys it may look 

 toward the Cebidce, to its distant relatives, the South American Sapa- 

 }ous. And what striking resemblances to these well-known monkeys 

 are noticeable in the Kinkajou, first cousin of the Coati-Mondi. 



We close with a great truth which this little creature unfolds, of 

 surpassing interest. As a synthetic type, this little being is very 

 ancient, even on the geological record. Its lineage goes high up the 

 stream of animal life. The first coati-mondi told off certain points of 

 the treat zoological plan yet to be unfolded. It typified the raccoon 

 yet to come, and the peccary, and the swine, and the bear, the tapir, 

 and the elephant ; and, as a faint, yet expressive signification, it told, 

 on its psychic side, at least, of the monkey, as the crown of the dumb 

 creation. And by the same record we read the superior antiquity of 

 the so-called New World to the Old: for the ancestors of Nasua were 



