MR. RIDLEY’S OBSERVATIONS 
that implied by the fact that both belong to the great 
order of Ungulata. The tapir’s “ lights,” in fact, tell 
the same story as its bones. There is no ruminating 
stomach, as in the Artiodactyle type, but instead a huge 
cecum like that of the horse and rhinoceros. 
The dark hues of the American tapirs (there are about 
four to five known species in Central and South America) 
suit the dim forests in which they move. And 
accordingly, one might think that the Old World tapur, 
with its belly-band of white, would be on that very 
account a conspicuous creature to marauding tigers. 
This is, according to Mr. H. N. Ridley, not at all the 
case. The innocuous tapir, with no means of defence 
save its heels, and they for flight, trusts to its likeness 
to grey and scattered boulders, frequent along the 
streams of the Malay peninsula, which it haunts. 
“When lying down in the day,” observes Mr. Ridley, 
“it exactly resembles a grey boulder.’”” The blackness 
of the tapir is a sign of maturity. The young animal, 
as is so often the case among mammals (e.g. the deer, 
the young of the puma, etc.) are flecked and striped 
with white. Those who have observed young tapirs 
wild, say that this spotting is an excellent preventative 
of slaughter by carnivorous beasts. When quietly 
lying down, the spots and stripes harmonize with 
patches and dots of sunlight piercing the trees and 
bushes of the forest lands which they prefer, and 
readily deceive even the trained eye of the naturalist 
or hunter. But of all such cases of supposed protection 
by likeness to environment, one is compelled to suggest 
that they depend for their probability, not only upon 
tre eye of man, who is at most only a recent foe of the 
animal world, but of other creatures who have hunted 
tapirs long before man was born into the world. In 
this case, how is it that the sense of smell, which is 
admittedly much keener among the majority of both 
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