CHAPTER X. 



THE LEMUROIDEA. 



THE INDRIS — THE LEMURS — THE RUFFED LEMUR — THE CAT LEMUR — THE HAPALEMUR — THE 

 CHEIROGALEUS — THE LORIS — THE TARSIER SPECTRE — THE AYE-AYE. 



WE now have arrived at the second division of the order Quad- 

 rumana, and have to describe the very peculiar animals to 

 which Linnaeus, the father of Natural History, gave the 

 name of Lemur. The Romans called by this appellation the spirits of 

 the departed, and the restless ghosts that wandered about during the 

 still hours of the night, and the naturalist applied it to these nocturnal 

 animals, which seem indeed to be the ghosts of departed creations. They 

 are the last surviving remains of a race which was once widely diffused ; 

 fossil specimens of numerous forms of Lemuroiuea occur in various 

 parts of Europe and North America, but the living specimens are found 

 in Madagascar, Ceylon, and the islands of Sumatra, Borneo, the Philip- 

 pines, and Celebes, with some scattered genera in the African contment. 

 To explain the occurrence of these strange animals at points so remote, 

 Mr. Sclatcr has supposed that a continent, now submerged, once extended 

 from Madagascar to Ceylon and Sumatra, in which the Lemuroid type of 

 animals was developed. To this hypothetical continent he gave the 

 name of Lemuria, and it probably represents a zoological region in some 

 long past geological epoch. 



Older writers have classed the Lemurs with the Apes, and called 

 them Prosimii, " Half-apes " or " False Apes," but their structure is 

 different from that of the true Simians, and their dental arrangements 

 peculiarly so. It is advisable therefore to keep them apart in a sub- 

 order. 



The Lemuroidea live in forest lands where fruit and insects furnish 

 them with food ; they are nocturnal in their habits, and during the day 

 retire to the darkest part of the forests where they coil themselves up 



