no ALLEN'S NATURALIST'S LIBRARY. 



strange wailing sound, as if of people in distress, or children 

 crying. Dr. Vinson says that the Betanimena tribe let these 

 animals at liberty if they find them in captivity, and give them 

 burial should they find them dead. They relate that a certain 

 tribe, at war with its neighbours, took refuge in the forests ; 

 their enemies, in pursuing them, led by the sound of human 

 voices, as they supposed, found before them a troop of 

 Babakoto, at whose appearance they were struck with terror. 

 They fled, persuaded that the fugitives had been changed into 

 beasts. These, on the other hand, vowed eternal gratitude 

 to the Lemurs who had saved them, and have ever since 

 religiously refrained from injuring them in any way. 



EXTINCT LEMUROIDEA. 



On a former page (antea, p. 13), attention was drawn to 

 the interrupted distribution of the Lemurs, and to their present 

 restricted range to the tropical and sub-tropical regions of 

 Africa, of Madagascar, and of part of the mainland and of the 

 islands of the Asiatic continent. In times geologically not 

 very remote, they were inhabitants of both worlds. 



The earliest appearance of the Primates in time is at the 

 beginning of the Tertiary period. Lemuroids, some of them 

 of a more or less primitive type, then lived in Europe in the 

 Lower Eocene period. In the higher beds of the same epoch 

 (to which the fresh-water deposits of the London clay of Eng- 

 land, the Plastic clay of France, and the prolific Wasatch beds 

 of Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado of America belong) un- 

 doubted Lemurs are represented by many genera, which in 

 the Middle Eocene attained to a great development. 



In the Upper Eocene of Europe many distinctively Lemu- 



