THE SQUIRRELS. 331 



Emerson Tennent, 'their leaps are prodigious; but generally 

 speaking, their progress is made not so much by leaping as by 

 swinging from branch to branch, using their powerful arms 

 alternately ; and when baffled by distance, flinging themselves 

 obliquely, so as to catch the lower boughs of an opposite tree, 

 the momentum acquired by their descent being sufficient to 

 cause a rebound of the branch that carries them upwards again, 

 till they can grasp a higher and more distant one, and thus 

 continue their headlong flight. In these perilous achievements, 

 wonder is excited less by the surprising agility of these little 

 creatures frequently encumbered as they are by their young, 

 which cling to them in their career than by the quickness of 

 their eye, and the unerring accuracy with which they seem 

 almost to calculate the angle at which a descent will enable 

 them to cover a given distance, and the recoil to attain a higher 

 altitude.' 



The squirrels, which in the forests of the temperate and 

 frigid zones perform the part of the monkeys in the tropical 

 woods, are likewise most admirable climbers. They have no 

 long arm, it is true, no hands to seize the branches with forcible 

 grasp, and the trace of an anterior thumb, armed with a nail, 

 is the only point of resemblance to remind one of the simias of 

 the equatorial regions ; but with equal agility they tread the 

 mazes of their arboreal paths, and it is equally difficult to shoot 

 them when in motion. They have been seen when hard- 

 pressed, and when the distance to the next tree has been beyond 

 their most extravagant leaps, to throw themselves off, spreading 

 abroad their limbs, so as to make their body as parachute-like 

 as possible to break their fall ; and on reaching the ground 

 without harm, bound along for the few intervening paces, and 

 ascend the tree with a celerity almost too quick for the eye to 

 follow. 



Thus the Almighty has created mammalia of the most dissi- 

 milar forms for an arboreal life, and yet, however different their 

 organization, none can be said to surpass the other, for each of 

 them is perfect in its kind. In the perennial foliage of the 

 tropical forests the sloth finds an abundant and never-failing 

 supply of food, so that he requires no great agility, and 

 can well afford to miss the faculty of leaping from tree to tree. 

 But the fruits of the forest are more thinly scattered they 



