Tro ALLEN’S NATURALIST’S LIBRARY. 
strange wailing sound, as if of people in distress, or children 
crying. Dr. Vinson says that the Betaniména tribe let these 
animals at liberty if they find them in captivity, and give them 
burial should they find them dead. ‘They relate that a certain 
tribe, at war with its neighbours, took refuge in the forests ; 
their enemies, in pursuing them, led by the sound of human 
voices, as they supposed, found before them a troop of 
Babakoto, at whose appearance they were struck with terror. 
They fled, persuaded that the fugitives had been changed into 
beasts. These, on the other hand, vowed eternal gratitude 
to the Lemurs who had saved them, and have ever since 
religiously refrained from injuring them in any way. 
EXTINCT LEMUROIDEA. 
On a former page (an/ed, p. 13), attention was drawn to 
the interrupted distribution of the Lemurs, and to their present 
restricted range to the tropical and sub-tropical regions of 
Africa, of Madagascar, and of part of the mainland and of the 
islands of the Asiatic continent. In times geologically not 
very remote, they were inhabitants of both worlds. 
The earliest appearance of the Primates in time is at the 
beginning of the Tertiary period. Lemuroids, some of them 
of a more or less primitive type, then lived in Europe in the 
Lower Eocene period. In the higher beds of the same epoch 
(to which the fresh-water deposits of the London clay of Eng- 
land, the Plastic clay of France, and the prolific Wasatch beds 
of Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado of America belong) un- 
doubted Lemurs are represented by many genera, which in 
the Middle Eocene attained to a great development. 
In the Upper Eocene of Europe many distinctively Lemu- 
