i8o APES, MONKEYS, AND LEMURS 



down below the jaws. The animal in this condition looks, at a short distance, as 

 though some one had laid a thick coat of red paint on its countenance. The death 

 of my pet was slow ; during the last twenty-four hours it lay prostrate, breathing 

 quickly, its chest slowing heaving ; the color of its face became gradually paler, but 

 was still red when it expired. As the hue did not quite disappear until two or three 

 hours after the animal was quite dead, I judged that it was not exclusively due to 

 the blood, but partly to a pigment beneath the skin, which would probably retain 

 its color a short time after the circulation had ceased. 



"After seeing much of the morose disposition of the uakari," continues Mr. 

 Bates, " I was not a little surprised one day at a friend's house to find an extremely 

 lively and familiar individual of this species. It ran from an inner chamber straight 

 towards me, after I had sat down on a chair, climbed my legs, and nestled in my 

 lap, turning round and looking up with the usual monkey's grin, after it had made 

 itself comfortable. It was a young animal, which had been taken when its mother 

 was shot with a poisoned arrow ; its teeth were incomplete, and the face was pale 

 and mottled, the glowing scarlet hue not supervening in these animals before 

 mature age ; it had also a few long black hairs on the eyebrows and lips. The 

 frisky little fellow had been reared in the house amongst the children, and allowed 

 to run about freely, and take its meals with the rest of the household. 



"The uakari is one of the many species of animals which are classified by 

 the Brazilians as mortal, or of delicate constitution, in contradistinction to those 

 which are duro, or hardy. A large proportion of the specimens sent from Ega die 

 before arriving at Para, and scarcely one in a dozen succeeds in reaching Rio 

 Janeiro alive. The difficulty it has of accommodating itself to changed conditions 

 probably has some connection with the very limited range, or confined sphere of 

 life, of the species in its natural state, its native home being an area of a swampy 

 woods, not more than about sixty square miles in extent, although no permanent 

 barrier exists to check its dispersal, except towards the south (where the Amazon 

 flows) , over a much wider space. ' ' 



Mr. Bates then goes on to relate how he had a captive uakari on board his 

 vessel, at the mouth of the Rio Negro, which escaped into the forest. On the day 

 after its escape, however, it reappeared, and took up its accustomed position on the 

 vessel, having evidently discovered that the forests of the Rio Negro were by no 

 means so suited to its existence as those of the delta lands of its native Japura 

 river. Uakaris are never known to descend of their own accord to the ground, 

 the forests inhabited by them being inundated during the greater part of the year. 

 Hence the shortness of their tails is no indication of their habits being more terres- 

 trial than those of the long-tailed sakis. 



OTHER SPECIES 



On the western side of the Putumayo river, the bald uakari is 



UakarT replaced by a closely allied species, known as the red-faced uakari ( U. 



rubicunda), which appears to have an equally confined distributional 



area, although the exact western limits of its range are unknown. This uakari dif- 



