256 CLASS MAMMALIA. 



the throat which are occasionally inflated. The hair is 

 long and soft ; but the face is without any, as are also the 

 breasts of the female. The orbits of the eye are circular 

 and remarkably prominent, and the canine teeth are 

 long. 



These animals are very common in Sumatra. They are 

 generally found assembled in large troops, conducted, as it 

 is said, by a chief, whom the Malays believe to be invulner- 

 able. Thus assembled at sunrise and again at sunset, 

 they vie with each other in making the most dreadful cries, 

 perfectly stunning to those accustomed to them, and 

 frightful in the highest degree to strangers. Their powers 

 of voice are doubtless increased by the guttural cavity 

 before alluded to, analogous to a similar apparatus found 

 in the howling monkeys of America. 



At all other times they appear to be perfectly quiet, so 

 long at least as they are undisturbed. Naturally slow and 

 heavy, they seem to want courage for climbing and activity 

 for leaping, so that when suddenly surprised, they may in 

 general be taken with ease ; but nature, while she has de- 

 prived them of the power of avoiding danger by quickness 

 and address, has endowed them with a great degree of 

 vigilance for their preservation, so that they are generally 

 alive to danger long enough before it reaches them to enable 

 them to effect their retreat. When on the ground, how- 

 ever, they fall an easy prey, overcome by fear and rendered 

 apparently more incapable by conscious weakness ; in this 

 situation their ineffectual efforts to fly display their imper- 

 fections, for the body too high and heavy for their short 

 and slender thighs inclines forward, and their dispropor- 

 tioned arms acting like stilts, enable them to advance only 

 by short and inefficient jumps. 



However numerous their troop, a wounded companion is 

 always abandoned immediately, contrary to the practice of 

 some other gregarious monkeys, unless indeed it be a young 



