CLASS I. MAMMALIA: ORDER 2. QUADRUMANA. 



75 



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ACTIVE GIBBON, OR OUNGHA. 



affection triumphs over every other passion, and the mother of a young one that has been 

 wounded will immediately throw away her life in an attack on an enemy. This affection is also 

 displayed under more pleasing circumstances; and their care of the persons of their young, by 

 washing, rubbing, and drying them, in spite of the pettish cries and resistance of the infant 

 siamang, is highly ludicrous and amusing. 



This species is easily tamed, or rather reconciled to bondage, but unconquerably timid : it never 

 displays the familiarity found in other monkeys, and its submission seems rather the result of 

 extreme apathy than of confidence and affection. The siamang, in short, displays very little of the 

 intellectual faculty, generally squatting, enveloped in its long arms, and the head brought down 

 between the legs, in which position it sleeps. It passes the greater part of its time in sullen re- 

 tirement, and seldom breaks its silence except by disagreeable cries, like those of the turkey. In 

 confinement it takes its food with leisure and indifference : its mode of drinking is equally meas- 

 ured Avith its other habits — that is, by placing the fingers in water and then sucking them. 



Mr. Bennet, in his " Wanderings," gives us an interesting account of a siamang which he kept 

 for a time, as follows : In the cabin there was a piece of soap, which had excited the creature's 

 cupidity, and for the abstraction of which he had been several times scolded. One day Mr. Ben- 

 net, while occupied in writing, happened to see the siamang engaged in his thievish practices. " I 

 watched him," says the observer, " without his perceiving that I did so, though he occasionally 

 east a furtive glance toward the place where I sat and pretended to write. He, seeing me busily 

 engaged, took up the soap, and moved away with it in his hand. When lie had walked half the 

 length of the cabin, I spoke quietly, without frightening him. The instant he found I saw him, 

 he walked back again, and deposited the soap nearly in the same place whence he had taken it ; 

 thus betraying, both by his first and last actions, a consciousness of having done wrong." 



The Mourning Gibbon, H. funerus, is a rare species, of which a single specimen was brought 

 to Europe from the Sooloo Isles, and placed in the Garden of Plants at Paris. Here it lived for 

 six months, displaying wonderful agility and a good degree of intelligence, but still inferior to 

 that of the higher apes. It recognized its keeper and others who visited it frequently, and received 

 their caresses with pleasure, but formed no attachment to any one. 



There are still several other species, as the Gibbon Lar, H. lar, which is the Great Gibbon ot 

 'Buffon, the White-handed Gibbon and Long-handed Gibbon of other authors, found in Malacca; 

 the White-faced Gibbon, H. leucogenys, its country not known ; the H. concolor, or H. Mulleri, 

 if Borneo ; the Ash-colored Gibbon, H. leuciscus, or Wou-Wou, of Camper, found in Java ; the 

 .Coromandel Gibbon, distinguished by a long beard and black mustaches ; Raffles' Gibbon, H. 

 'Rafflesii, of Sumatra, often confounded with the gibbon lar; and the H. entelloides, of India. 



