86 GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION. 



Schweinfurth, and more recent travellers, seem to show, almost 

 beyond doubt, that the gorilla, which until recently was consid- 

 ered to be limited in its haunts to the west-coast region — the forest 

 tracts lying between about ten degrees of north latitude and the 

 Gaboon River, including the Crystal Mountains — is in reality also 

 an inhabitant of the deep interior of the continent, frequenting the 

 forest recesses which bound the western tributaries of the Nile. 

 Lower in the scale of organisation, but scarcely inferior in size in 

 many cases to the anthropoid apes, are the dog-faced monkeys, 

 constituting the family Cynopithecida). These, which embrace 

 many of the most savage forms of all the monkey tribe, inhabit 

 the greater portion of the Ethiopian region, the forests as well 

 as the open plains and rocky fastnesses of mountain solitudes. 

 Among the better known and more formidable members of this 

 extensive family, which is also well represented in the Oriental 

 region (macaques), and less numerously in the Austro-Malaysian 

 (the islands of Batchian and Timor) and Tyrrhenian (the Barbary 

 ape of the Rock of Gibraltar) transition regions, are the baboons, 

 mandrills, chacmas, Diana monkeys, and mangabeys, the first three 

 being characterised by a prolonged snout, similar to that of the 

 dog, at the extremity of which are situated the nostrils; the tail is 

 rudimentary, or almost completely wanting. The Colobi constitute 

 another extensive group of African apes. True monkeys, as well 

 as the more distinctive of the African Mammalia — such as the lion, 

 leopard, hyena, zebra, antelopes, giraffe, hippopotamus, and rhi- 

 noceros — are wholly wanting in the Island of Madagascar, whose 

 principal mammalian feature is constituted by the lemurs (Lemur- 

 idse), or half -monkeys, a group of animals usually considered to 

 form a sub-order of the Quadrumana, in certain peculiarities of 

 structure closely approximating the most ancient progenitors of the 

 ungulates. The presence of lemurs on the Island of Madagascar, 

 the continent of Africa, and Southern India (with Ceylon), has led 

 some naturalists to the conclusion that at one time direct land 

 connection existed between the several regions, an assumption 

 that is by some naturalists considered to be further borne out by 

 other equally well-marked faunal characteristics. To this supposed 

 formerly-existing land-mass of the Indian Ocean, which, if it ever 

 existed, may or may not be represented in part by the sunken 

 "Chagos Banks," and the outlying islands, such as the Seychelles, 



