138 SIXTH REPORT — 1836. 



pedimana, which with the exception of the phalangers of the 

 Indian archipelago is proper to the New World and to Australia. 

 There are no apes nor baboons without tails in the group ; even 

 the callosities of the buttocks are wanting, and a large proportion 

 of the species have prehensile tails endowed with so great a 

 delicacy of touch that they have been compared to the trunk of 

 the elephant. This modification of structure evidently indicates 

 great capability of travelling from tree to tree in lofty and 

 crowded forests, and it is worthy of remark that America excels 

 the other quarters of the world in the variety of animals which 

 use the tail as an organ of prehension or progression among trees, 

 for not only the genera mycetes, hrachi/feles, ateles, lagothrix, 

 and cebus among the quadrumana possess this power, but also 

 didelpliis among the marsupiata, cercolejjtes* ranking with the 

 carnivora, and syntheres and ccqrromys with the rodentia. 



The monkeys which enter the southern provinces of Mexico 

 belong to the genera mycetes and hapalef. 



Old. CARNIVORA. Fayn. Cheiroptera. 



The members of this family which have hitherto been detected 

 in North America belong to that tribe of the " true or insecti- 

 vorous bats" which Cuvier has characterized as possessing only 

 one bony phalanx in the index, and two in each of the other 

 fingers. This is in fact the only tribe of cheiropterce which is 

 distributed generally over the world, and to it all the European 

 bats belong, with the solitary exception of the Italian dinops 

 Cestonii. The other subdivision of the true bats, comprising 

 molossiis, dinops, nyctinomes, cheiromeles, noctilio and phyllo- 

 stoma, is chiefly South American, though it has a few represen- 

 tatives in the warmer regions of the old continent. Phyllo- 

 stoma., the most remarkable of the generic groups, is indeed 

 peculiar to the new world; hvA phyllostoma spectrum, placed by 

 Geoffroy in a distinct genus named vampirus, is the only 

 species which authors have mentioned as ranging northwards to 

 New Spain J. 



The following bats have been noted as inhabitants of the 

 United States and British America; and though they almost all 

 belong to the cosmopolitan genus vespertiiio, none of the Ame- 

 rican species have been detected in other countries. 



* The closest affinities of cercoleptes are with the ursiform plantigrada. — 

 Owen, Zoo/. Proc. , No. 32, 1835. 



+ " Bmll-affeii " and " Klammcr-affcn." — Licutenstein, op. cit., p. 97. 

 X Desmar. Mamm., Griff. Cuv., &-c. 



