92 CARIPI AND THE BAY OF MARA/JO. Cuap. V. 
It is not uncommon in the drier forests of the Amazons valley, but is 
not found, I believe, in the Ygapo, or flooded lands. The Brazilians 
call the species the Tamandua bandeira, or the Banner Ant-eater, the 
term banner being applied in allusion to the curious coloration of the 
animal, each side of the body having a broad oblique stripe, half gray 
and half black, which gives it some resemblance to a heraldic banner. 
It has an excessively long slender muzzle, and a wormlike extensile 
tongue. Its jaws are destitute of teeth. The claws are much elongated 
and its gait is very awkward. It lives on the ground, and feeds on 
termites, or white ants ; the long claws being employed to pull in pieces 
the solid hillocks made by the insects, and the long flexible tongue to 
lick them up from the crevices. All the other species of this singular 
genus are arboreal. I met with four species altogether. One was the 
Myrmecophaga tetradactyla; the two others, more curious and less 
known, were very small kinds, called Tamandua-i. Both are similar in 
size—ten inches in length, exclusive of the tail—and in the number of 
claws, having two of unequal length to the anterior feet, and four to the 
hind feet. One species is clothed with grayish-yellow silky hair ; this 
is of rare occurrence. The other has a fur of a dingy brown colour, 
without silky lustre. One was brought to me alive at Caripi, having 
been caught by an Indian, clinging motionless inside a hollow tree. I 
kept it in the house about twenty-four hours. It had a moderately long 
snout, curved downwards, and extremely small eyes. It remained nearly 
all the time without motion, except when irritated, in which case it 
reared itself on its hind legs from the back of a chair to which it clung, 
and clawed out with its forepaws like a cat. Its manner of clinging 
with its claws, and the sluggishness of its motions, gave it a great 
resemblance to a sloth. It uttered no sound, and remained all night 
on the spot where I had placed it in the morning. The next day I put 
in on a tree in the open air, and at night it escaped. These small 
Tamanduds are nocturnal in their habits, and feed on those species of 
termites which construct earthy nests, that look like ugly excrescences, 
on the trunks and branches of trees. The different kinds of ant-eaters 
are thus adapted to various modes of life, terrestrial and arboreal. 
Those which live on trees are again either diurnal or nocturnal, for 
Myrmecophaga tetradactyla is seen moving along the main branches 
in the daytime. The allied group of the Sloths, which are still more 
exclusively South American forms than ant-eaters are, at the present 
time furnish arboreal species only; but formerly terrestrial forms of 
sloths existed, as the Megatherium, whose mode of life was a puzzle, 
seeing that it was of too colossal .a size to live on trees, until Owen 
showed how it might have obtained its food from the ground. 
In January the orange trees became covered with blossom-—at least 
to a greater extent than usual, for they flower more or less in this 
country all the year round—and the flowers attracted a great number of 
humming-birds. Every day, in the cooler hours of the morning, and in 
the evening from four o’clock till six, they were to be seen whirling 
about the trees by scores. ‘Their motions are unlike those of all other 
birds. They dart to and fro so swiftly that the eye can scarcely follow 
them, and when they stop before a flower it is only for a few moments. 
