THE TAPIR PEDIGREE 137 



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 motor 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 con- 

 tained big palm-nuts ; they had been swallowed with- 

 out 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 con- 

 tinued substantially unchsfcged. Originally the tapirs 

 dwelt in the northern hemisphere, but there they 

 gradually died out, the more specialized horse, and 

 even for long ages the rhinoceros, persisting after they 

 had vanished ; and nowadays the surviving tapirs are 

 found in Malaysia and South America, far from their 

 original home. The relations of the horse and tapir in 

 the paleontological history of South America are very 

 curious. Both were, geologically speaking, compara- 

 tively recent immigrants, and if they came at different 

 dates it is almost certain that the horse came later. 

 The horse for an age or two, certainly for many 

 hundreds of thousands of years, throve greatly, and 

 developed not only several different species, but even 



