TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. — DEPT. ZOOLOGY AND BOTANY. 551 



A3 might naturally be supposed, apes and monkeys have, for various reasons, 

 attracted the attention of observers of nature from very early times, and conse- 

 quently Linnaeus was able to give rather a goodly list of species of these animals, 

 amounting to thirty-three ; but of their mutual affinities, and of the important 

 structural differences which exist between many of them, he seems to have had no 

 idea, his three divisions being simply regulated by the condition of the tail, whether 

 absent, short, or long. 



We now know that the so-called Anthropoid or man-like apes, the gorilla, 

 chimpanzee, orang, and gibbons, form a group apart from all the others of such im- 

 portance, that everything related to their history, structure, and habits has been most 

 assiduously studied, and there is now an immense literature devoted to this group 

 alone. Nothing could better illustrate the advances we have made in a hundred 

 years, than the contrast of our present knowledge of these forms with that of 

 Linnaeus. It is true that, as shown in the most interesting story of the gradual de- 

 velopment of our knowledge relating to them in the first chapter of Huxley's ' Man's 

 Place in Nature,' the animal now called gorilla was, without doubt, the pongo, well 

 known to, and clearly described by our countryman, Andrew Battle, a contemporary 

 of Shakespeare ; and that a really accurate and scientific account of the anatomy of 

 the chimpanzee had been published as far back as 1699 by Dr. Edward Tyson, who, 

 as the first English comparative anatomist, I am proud to claim as in some sort a 

 predecessor in the chair I have the honour to hold in London, as he is described on 

 the title-page of his work as " Reader of Anatomy at Chirurgeons' Hall." 



Linnaeus was, however, not acquainted with these, and his second species of 

 the genus Homo, H. troglodytes, and his first of the genus Simia, S. satyrus, were 

 both made up of vague and semi-fabulous a-counts of the animals now known as 

 chimpanzees and orange, but hopelessly confounded together. Of the gorilla, and 

 what is stranger still, of any of the large genus of gibbons, or long-armed apes of 

 South-eastern Asia, he had at the time he revised the Systema no idea. 



The remaining monkeys, we now know, fall into three very distinct sections : 

 the Cei-copithecidce of the Old World, and the Cebidce and Hapalidce of the New, 

 or by whatever other names we may like to designate them. Although members 

 of all three groups appear in the list in the Systema, they are all confusedly mixed 

 together. Even that the American monkeys belong to a totally different stock 

 from those of the Old World, does not seem to have been suspected. 



The genus Lemur of Linnaeus comprehends five species, of which the first four 

 wpre all the then known forms of a most interesting section of the Mammalia. 

 These animals, mostly inhabitants of the great island of Madagascar, though some 

 are found in the African continent, and others in some of the Southern and Eastern 

 parts of Asia, constitute a well-defined group, but one of which the relations are 

 very uncertain. At one time, as in the system of Linnaeus, they were closely asso- 

 ciated with the monkeys. As more complete knowledge of their organization has 

 been gradually attained, the interval which separates them structurally from those 

 animals has become continually more evident, and since they cannot be placed 

 within the limits of any of the previously constituted orders, ithasbeeu considered 

 advisable by some naturalists to increase the ordinal divisions in their behalf and to 

 allow them to take rank as a distinct group, related to the Primates on the one hand, 

 and to the Carnivora and Insectivora on the other. The knowledge of their rela- 

 tions, however, bids fair to be greatly increased by the discoveries of fossil forms 

 lately made both in France and America, some of which seem to carry their 

 affinities even to the Unyidata. 



Existing upon the earth at present, besides the more ordinary Lemurs to which 

 the species known to Linnaeus belong, there are two aberrant forms, each represented 

 by a single species. These are the little Tarsius of Borneo and Celebes, and the 

 singular CMromys, or Aye-aye, which, though an inhabitant of the head-quarters of 

 the group, Madagascar, and living in the same forests and under the same con- 

 ditions as the most typical Lemurs, exhibits a most remarkable degree of speciali- 

 zation in the structure both of limbs and teeth, the latter being modified so as to 

 resemble, at least superficially, those of the Rodents, a group with which in fact it 

 was once placed. It was discovered by Sonnerat in Madagascar iu 1780, two 



