142 THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS 



two or three more tapirs. One was a bull, full grown but 

 very much smaller than the animal I had killed. The 

 hunters said that this was a distinct kind. The skull and 

 skin were sent back with the other specimens to the Ameri- 

 can Museum, where after due examination and compari- 

 son its specific identity will be established. Tapirs are 

 solitary beasts. Two are rarely found together, except in 

 the case of a cow and its spotted and streaked calf. They 

 live in dense cover, usually lying down in the daytime and 

 at night coming out to feed, and going to the river or to 

 some lagoon to bathe and swim. From this camp Sigg 

 took Lieutenant Lyra back to Caceres to get something 

 that had been overlooked. They went in a rowboat to 

 which the niotor had been attached, and at night on the 

 way back almost ran over a tapir that was swimming. 

 But in unfrequented places tapirs both feed and bathe 

 during the day. The stomach of the one I shot contained 

 big palm-nuts; they had been swallowed without enough 

 mastication to break the kernel, the outer pulp being what 

 the tapir prized. Tapirs gallop well, and their tough hide 

 and wedge shape enable them to go at speed through very 

 dense cover. They try to stamp on, and even to bite, a 

 foe, but are only clumsy fighters. 



The tapir is a very archaic type of ungulate, not un- 

 like the non-specialized beasts of the oligocene. From some 

 such ancestral type the highly specialized one-toed modern 

 horse has evolved, while during the uncounted ages that 

 saw the horse thus develop the tapir has continued sub- 

 stantially unchanged. Originally the tapirs dwelt in the 

 northern hemisphere, but there they gradually died out, 

 the more specialized horse, and even for long ages the 



