MONKEYS OF THE OLD AND THE NEW WORLD. 



689 



tbem that whole oceans roll between them, that they have not migrated from one 

 hemisphere to another, but belong to two different phases of creation. While the 

 nasal partition of the Old World slmise is narrow as in man, it is broad without excep- 

 tion in all the American monkeys, so that the nostrils are widely separated and open 

 sideways. The dental apparatus is also different, for while the monkeys of the eastern 

 hemisphere have thirty-two teeth, those of the western world generally possess thirty- 

 six. The tailless monkeys or apes, and the short-tailed baboons, with a dog-like pro- 

 jecting snout and formidable fangs, are peculiar to the eastern hemisphere, and it is 

 only there that we find almost voiceless simise, while the American quadrumana are 

 all of them tailed, short-snouted, and generally endowed with stentorian powers. 

 Finally, it would be as useless to look among the western monkeys for cheek-pouches 

 and sessile callosities, as among those of the Old World for prehensile tails. 



In the boundless forests of tropical South America, the monkeys form by far the 

 greater part of the mammalian inhabitants, for each species, though often confined 

 within narrow limits, generally consists of a large number of individuals. The various 

 arboreal fruits which the savage population of the.se immeasurable wilds is unable to 

 turn to advantage, fall chiefly to their share ; many of them also live upon insects. 

 They are never seen in the open carapos and savannas, as they never touch the ground 

 unless compelled by the greatest necessity. The trees of the forest furnish them with 

 all the food they require in inexhaustible abundance. For their perpetual wanderings 

 from branch to branch, nature has bountifully endowed many of them not only with 

 robust and muscular limbs, and large hands, whose moist palms facilitate the seizure 

 of a bough, but in many cases also with a prehensile tail, which may deservedly be 

 called a fifth hand, and is hardly less wonderful in its structure than the proboscis of 

 the elephant. Covered with short hair, and completely bare underneath towards the 

 end, this admirable organ rolls round the boughs as though it were a supple Rni^er, 

 and is at the same time so muscular, that the monkey frequently swings with it from 

 a branch like the pendulum of a clock. 



Scarce has he grasped a bough with his long arms, when immediately coiling his 

 fifth hand round the branch, he springs on to the next, and secure from a fall, hurries 

 so rapidly through the crowns of the highest trees that the sportsman's ball has scarce 

 time to reach him in his flight. When the Miriki (Ateles hypoxanthus), the largest 

 of the Brazilian monkeys, sitting or stretched out at full length, suns himself on a 

 high branch, his tail suffices to support him in his aerial resting-place, and even when 

 mortally wounded, he remains a long time suspended by it, until life being quite 

 extinct, his heavy body, whizzing through the air, and breaking many a bough as it 

 descends, falls with a loud crash to the ground. The famous wourali poison is alone 

 capable of instantly annihilating his muscular powers, and of sparing the wounded 

 animal a long and painful agony. Slow and with noiseless step, so as scarcely to dis- 

 turb the fallen leaves beneath his feet, the wily Indian approaches. His weapons are 

 strange and peculiar, and of so slight an appearance as to form a wondrous contrast to 

 their terrific power. A colossal species of bamboo {Arundinaria Schomburfjkii), 

 whose perfectly cylindrical culm often rises to the hight of fifteen feet from the root 

 before it forms its first knot, furnishes him with his blow-pipe, and the slender arrows 

 which he sends forth with unerring certainty of aim are made of the leaf-stalks of a 

 species of palm-tree {Maximiliana regia), hard and brittle, and sharp-pointed as a 



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