ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS. 
165 
animal :—“ A live bird was let loose in her apartment : she 
marked its flight, made a long swing to a distant branch, 
caught the bird with one hand in her passage and attained 
the branch with her other hand ; her aim, both at the 
bird and the branch, being as successful as if one object 
only had engaged her attention/' He adds, “that 
she instantly bit off the head of the bird, picked its 
feathers and then threw it down without attempting to 
eat it.” 
The species here exhibited in Cages 1 and 2, is com¬ 
monly known as the Hoolock, a word coined in imitation of 
its call, and which would be more accurately represented by 
hooko which the animal rapidly repeats in a crescendo 
fashion, with increasing rapidity, until the call almost ends 
in a screech, when it suddenly drops to a deep guttural 
dh , dh> which gradually dies away. The voice of this 
Gibbon is one of the characteristic sounds heard in the 
forests of Assam and in the other regions in which the 
species is found, and whole troops, for the hoolock appears 
to be gregarious, may be heard calling in the early 
morning and in the evening, either while resting, or in 
progressing from tree to tree down, or up a forest-clad 
mountain side. Many newly-born hoolocks are pale 
yellow, and others black, so that the colour of the 
species is variable, and seemingly independent of age 
or sex. The old female, in Cage 1, is an inveterate 
hater of the gentler sex of human kind, and carries 
it even to a passion, seizing every opportunity to 
vent her spleen in fierce and dangerous attacks, so 
that the greatest precautions have to be taken that 
she does not escape, when the door of her house has to 
be opened. On one occasion, however, she managed 
