176 
NATURAL HISTORY. 
animals thus canglit become tame forthwith. Two females were once kept at the Jarclin des Plantes, 
in Paris, and Geolfroy St. Hilaire says they rarely quitted each other, remaining most part of the 
time in close embrace, folding their tails round each other’s bodies ; they took their meals together, 
and never squabbled over their favourite fruit. 
The same traveller when once very hard up for food was obliged to kill a white- whiskered Coaita, 
and cook it. He writes : — “ I thought the meat the best flavoured I had ever tasted. It resembled 
beef, but had a richer and sweeter taste. We smoke-dried the joints, and the last one was an arm 
with the clenched fist. This I used with great frugality, hanging it between meals on a nail in the 
cabin, and nothing but the hardest necessity could have driven me to an act so closely resembling 
cannibalism.” 
THE COAITA, 
THE CHAMECK, OR TSCHAKMECK. * 
An old author, Yon Sack, in his voyage to Guinea, gives the following account of the manners of 
this Spider Monkey : — “ It is of a very docile disposition, and capable of being quite domesticated. 
I have seen a pair of them at a gentleman’s house at Paramaribo, which were left quite at liberty. 
When the female negroes were employed at their needlework, they used to come and sit amongst them 
and play witli pieces of paper, and afterwards go and gambol amongst the trees, but never went over 
to the neighbouring gardens. They well knew the hour of dinner of their master, when they would 
come to the gallery, look in at the windows, though without attempting to enter into the room, being 
aware that this was a liberty which was not allowed them ; they therefore patiently waited for their 
dinner outside.” 
The Latin name of this species refers to its having hardly five fingers. It has four and a short 
stump of a thumb, visible and useless, but consisting of two bones, the usual muscles, and the skin 
* Ateles sub-pen tadactylus. 
