RARE AND BEAUTIFUL MONKEYS 
249 
imagination of old Cosimo Tura, “the rugged and 
angular but illustrious painter ” of the fifteenth 
century, who filled the backgrounds of his stately 
pictures of pageants and processions, and his illumin- 
ations in the choir-books of Ferrara, with groups of 
the fantastic and decorative monkeys which be had 
seen kept as pets in the precincts of the ducal palace. 
Like the lemurs and lories, with which they are not 
remotely related, the most elegant little monkeys are 
natives of the great tropical forest ; but the rarest and 
most interesting of the tribe are so delicate that their 
brief lives are passed almost unnoticed at the Zoo, 
where most of them, as they arrive from time to 
time in the Gardens, are kept secluded in an inner 
chamber. Those from the woods of Guiana and 
Brazil are at once the most beautiful in form and the 
richest in colouring. Like all the monkeys of the 
New World, they have round heads and broad noses, 
of the order known as the “ cogitative nose ” in the 
classification by which an ingenious physiognomist 
recently determined the place of that organ as an 
index to character. There is, however, little else in 
the countenances of these vivacious little creatures 
which suggests a reflective mind ; though the separ- 
ation of the nostrils by a wide breadth of cartilage is 
the character-mark which distinguishes the monkeys 
of the New World from those of the Old, and rescues 
the face of each and all of them from the cast of 
vicious inanity which disfigures so many of the latter. 
Whatever human features they possess are neither 
