SOME CHARACTERISTIC DIFFERENCES. 487 



banquet off their own kind. It has been observed that those tribes 

 which are not cannibal do not share the liking of their neighbours 

 for the flesh of the Gorilla or the Chimpanzee ; many even shrink 

 from it with peculiar horror, on account of the kinship existing, 

 as they believe, between these apes and man, and the superstitious 

 creed which represent these animals as supernatural beings, whose 

 bodies are the refuge of the souls of their relatives, or of their friends, 

 labouring for their crimes under an eternal curse ! 



CHAPTER VIII. 



ANIMAL LIFE IN THE FORESTS : THE CEBID^, OR MONKEYS OF 



AMERICA THE LEMURS THE SLOTHS THE SQUIRRELS. 



THE Ancient Continent possesses, in addition to the great apes of 

 which I have already spoken, the Macaucos, the Cynocephali, and 

 the Anthropomorphes, other apes of more erect, and one might even 

 say more elegant figures, essentially climbers, and provided with a 

 long, but not prehensile tail. Such are the Semnopitheci and the 

 Monkeys of the African forests, of India and Indo-China, of Japan 

 and the Indian Archipelago. These two latter groups approximate, 

 by their external forms, to the apes of the New World ; divided by 

 Buffon into Sagouins and Sapajous, but re-united in the new classifi- 

 cation of naturalists under one single family, named Cebidce. These 

 one genus, the Brachiura, excepted have all a very long, and, 

 generally, a prehensile tail. They differ, moreover, from the Simidse 

 of the Old World in the disposition of their nostrils, which are 

 always open laterally, and separated by a thick depressed membrane ; 

 in such wise, that it might also be affirmed they were gifted with 

 two noses ! By nature they are of a gentle and placable disposition, 



