■238 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



Ckrtain markings sometimes found on the Dolphin [Grampus griseus) 

 are now generally accepted as the traces of encounters between these 

 animals and large Cuttle-fishes. These markings are well figured in 

 Flower's paper in the Trans. Zool. Soc. (vol. viii. pi. 1), and the suggestion 

 was first made by Capt. Chaves, of Ponta Delgada.* Prof. D'Arcy W. 

 Thompson, in the last issue of the Ann. and Mag. Nat. Hist., has drawn 

 attention to an older illustration of a Dolphin on which a great Cuttle-fish 

 has left his unmistakable marks. The figure referred to is that on 

 pi. xxviii. (Mammiferes), fig. 2, of the * Voyage de I'Astrolabe,' and repre- 

 sents the lower surface of the head of Delphinus nova-selandicB, Q. et G. 

 The writer remarks : — " A glance at the figure will show that the so-called 

 pores are the clear impressions of the suckers of a Cuttle-fish. The 

 Dolphin itself was 5 feet 10 inches long, and we may judge from the 

 figures that the sucker-rings were about, or very nearly, an inch in diameter. 

 We may, perhaps, go a little further, and surmise that while these im- 

 pressions were left by the suckers, the patches of ' striae ' were produced by 

 tentacular hooks — in short, that the Cuttle-fish which made both was a 

 giant Onychoteuthis." 



In the * Athenaeum ' for June 1st, Mr. James Piatt, Jun., has com- 

 municated an interesting letter on the Brazilian names of Monkeys. 



" There is an interesting little group of five native names of South 

 American Monkeys — saguin, sapajou, sai, saimiri, sajou — of which the 

 ' Century Dictionary ' remarks that they are ' now become inextricably 

 confounded by the different usages of authors, if, indeed, they had originally 

 specific meanings.' The ' Century ' vouchsafes practically no etymology of 

 these zoological terms. They all belong to the Tupi language of Brazil. 

 Sai is the word for Monkey. Sai-miri is its diminutive, from miri, 

 meaning little. Sajou, on the contrary, is a French contraction for 

 sajouassoti, as Buffon spells it, or sai-uassu, as it should be written, where 

 the termination -uassu is augmentative. We thus arrive at three shades 

 of meaning to begin with. Research among old French works of travel 

 would have thrown further light on the distinction between these terms in 

 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Jean de Lery, 1580, carefully 

 separates gay, Gueuon, from sagouin. Marmot. A still better authority is 

 Claude d'Abbeville, whose ' Mission en Maragnan,' 1614, pp. 252-3, ad- 

 duces all five names, in his orthography sagouy, sapaiou, gayou, gaymiry, 

 gayouassou. The last he defines as ' graude monne ou grande guenon.' 

 Sapaiou, according to him, really is a synonym for gaymiry. 



"A sixth hitherto unexplained word for a kind of Monkey is ouarine, 



* In Girard's " Cephalopodes des iles Acores," Torn. Se. math. phys. e 

 natur. Lisboa (2), 11 1892. 



