686 



THE TROPICAL WORLD. 



harmony with the sombre stillness of these dim regions, commencing like the gurgling 

 of water when a bottle is being filled, and ending with a long, loud wailing cry, which 

 resounds throughout the leafy solitude to a great distance, and is sometimes responded 

 to from the depths of the forest by another note as wild and melancholy. 



We shall see that the American monkeys are totally different from those of the Old 

 World ; but also in the eastern hemisphere, each part of the world has its peculiar 

 families and genera of simiae. Thus, besides the orang outang and the gibbon, Asia 

 exclusively possesses the semnopitheci and the macaques, while Africa, besides the 

 chimpanzee and the gorilla, enjoys the undivided honor of giving birth to the families 

 of the cercopitheci, mangabeys, colobi, magots, and baboons. The Semnopitheci are 

 characterized by a short face, rounded ears, a slender body, short thumbs, and a strong 

 muscular tail, terminated by a close tuft of hair, and surpassing in length that of all 

 the other quadrumana of the Old World. To this genus belongs the celebrated Pro- 

 boscis Monkey (^Semnopithecus nasicus) of Borneo, who is distinguished from all 

 other simise by the possession of a prominent nasal organ, which lends a highly ludi- 

 crous expression to the melancholy aspect of his physiognomy. When excited and 

 angry, the female resembles some tanned and peevish hag, snarling and shrewish. 

 When they sleep, they squat on their hams, and bow their heads upon the breast. 

 When disturbed, they utter a short impatient cry, between a sneeze and a scream, like 

 that of a spoilt and passionate child. When they emit their peculiar wheezing or hiss- 

 ing sound, they avert and wrinkle the nose, and open the mouth wide. In the male, 

 the nose is a curved, tubular trunk, large, pendulous, and fleshy ; but in the female 

 it is smaller, recurved, and not flesh-like. 



Under the ugly form of the Huniman (Semnopithecus entellus), the Hindoos ven- 

 erate the transformed hero who abstracted the sweet fruit of the mango from the garden 

 of a giant in Ceylon, and enriched India with the costly gift. As a punishment for 

 this offense he was condemned to the stake, and ever since his hands and face have 

 remained black. Out of gratitude for his past services, the Hindoos allow him the 

 free use of their gardens, and take great care to protect him from sacrilegious Euro- 

 peans. While the French naturalist Duvaucel was at Chandernagore, a guard of pious 

 Brahmins was busy scaring away the sacred animals with cymbals and drums, lest "the 

 stranger, to whom they very justly attributed evil intentions, might be tempted to add 

 their skins to his collection. 



The semnopitUeci are scattered over Asia in so great a multiplicity of forms, that 

 Ceylon alone possesses four different species, each of which has appropriated to itself 

 a different district of the wooded country, and seldom encroaches on the domain of 

 its neighbors. When observed in their native wilds, a party of twenty or thirty of the 

 Wanderoos of the low country, the species best known in Europe {Preshytes cephalop- 

 terus), is generally busily engaged in the search for berries and buds. They are sel- 

 dom to be seen on the ground, and then only when they have descended to recover 

 seeds or fruit that have fallen at the foot of their favorite trees. In their alarm, when 

 disturbed, their leaps are prodigious, but generally speaking their progress is made 

 not so much by leaping as by swinging from branch to branch, using their powerful 

 arms alternately, and when baffled by distance, flinging themselves obliquely so as to 

 catch the lower bough of an opposite tree ; the momentum acquired by their descent 

 being sufficient to cause a rebound, that carries them again upwards till they can grasp 



