THE LEMURS. 13 
flexor longus digitorum) differ generally in arrangement from 
those of the higher Primates. 
The Lemuroids are of no commercial value to Man. 
As regards their distribution, the Lemuroidea are now abso- 
lutely confined to the Old World, and predominate in the 
island of Madagascar, where, as M. Grandidier remarks in his 
magnificent work on that country, there is scarcely a little wood 
in any district in which they are not found. Indeed, of the 
nearly seventy species of Mammals inhabiting that island, 
thirty-five, or one-half, are Lemurs. Members of the family 
also occur across the whole of the neighbouring continent of 
Africa, but their northern range does not reach quite to the 
tropic, whereas it extends some few degrees beyond it in the 
Southern Hemisphere. Elsewhere they are confined to the 
forests of the Oriental region. More or less isolated in South- 
ern India, they re-appear in China, and spreading south to 
Java they reach as far east as Celebes and the Philippine 
Islands. ‘The present isolation of the Lemurs in two such 
distant areas—in Africa and Madagascar and some of the 
Mascarene Islands on the one hand, and in Southern India, 
China, Ceylon, and the Malayan Islands on the other—has 
been considered by some naturalists as weighty evidence in 
favour of a former land connection between these distant 

regions. 
Though so restricted in their distribution at the present day, 
this group was more widely represented in past ages of the 
world’s history, as we shall have to point out later on. Abun- 
dant fossil remains prove that they lived in Europe and in 
North America, where to-day they are quite unknown. 
The ZLemuroidea are almost entirely arboreal, and seldom 
come to the ground, except the Sifakas, which then progress 
