220 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES. 



haps, of mediaeval demonism and modern spiritualism, 

 — " ghost-mongery," as the sceptical Germans call it. 

 Monkeys are not very sharp-scented, and have to rely 

 on their eyes, and in night-time, therefore, are almost at 

 the mercy of their enemies, jaguars, panthers, and leop- 

 ards, whose owl-eyes enable them to hunt by moonlight, 

 and in the virgin woods of the tropics the constant dread 

 of mistaking the approach of a murderer for the rustling 

 of the fitful night-wind would be enough to make a Ber- 

 serker nervous. " It is not books or pictures," says 

 Charles Lamb, " nor the stories of foolish servants, which 

 create these terrors in children. They can at most give 

 them a direction. The stories of the Chimaeras and 

 Gorgons may reproduce themselves in the brain of super- 

 stition, but they were there before. They are transcripts, 

 types : the archetypes are in us, and eternal." May it not 

 be that those archetypes are the prowling ferce of the 

 tropical forests ? 



There is a story about an ex-railroad-conductor who, 

 in the fever-dream of his last disease, called out the forty 

 stations of his route, in due succession, and at correct 

 intervals, and the fortieth at the terminus of his life ; but 

 the power of habit manifests itself quite as strangely in 

 the " second nature" of our domestic animals. The 

 trapiches, or cog-wheel mills, of the Mexican planters 

 are turned by horses, which have to make several thou- 

 sand rounds in the course of the day ; and in the soli- 

 tudes of the chaparral it is nothing uncommon to see a 



