THE LEMURS. 



13 



fiexor longus digitorum) differ generally in arrangement from 

 those of the higher Primates. 



The Lemuroids are of no commercial value to Man. 



As regards their distribution, the Lemuroidea are now abso- 

 lutely confined to the Old World, and predominate in the 

 island of Madagascar, where, as M. Grandidier remarks in his 

 magnificent work on that country, there is scarcely a little wood 

 in any district in which they are not found. Indeed, of the 

 nearly seventy species of Mammals inhabiting that island, 

 thirty-five, or one-half, are Lemurs. Members of the family 

 also occur across the whole of the neighbouring continent of 

 Africa, but their northern range does not reach quite to the 

 tropic, whereas it extends some few degrees beyond it in the 

 Southern Hemisphere. Elsewhere they are confined to the 

 forests of the Oriental region. More or less isolated in South- 

 ern India, they re-appear in China, and spreading south to 

 Java they reach as far east as Celebes and the Philippine 

 Islands. The present isolation of the Lemurs in two such 

 distant areas — in Africa and Madagascar and some of the 

 Mascarene Islands on the one hand, and in Southern India, 

 China, Ceylon, and the Malayan Islands on the other — has 

 been considered by some naturalists as weighty evidence in 

 favour of a former land connection between these distant 

 regions. 



Though so restricted in their distribution at the present day, 

 this group was more widely represented in past ages of the 

 world's history, as we shall have to point out later on. Abun- 

 dant fossil remains prove that they lived in Europe and in 

 North America, where to-day they are quite unknown. 



The Lemuroidea are almost entirely arboreal, and seldom 

 come to the ground, except the Sifakas, which then progress 



