32 MAMMALS

come what may be classed as the monkeys properly
so called, comprising the three families of the narrow-
nosed monkeys, confined to the Old World, the
broad-nosed monkeys, confined to America, and the —
marmosets, which are also exclusively American. Of
these three groups there are at least two hundred
species. Few people have a notion of the relative
importance of monkeys in the animal series, or of
their wide distribution in the present and the past.
Although there is now but one monkey in Europe,
Macacus inuus, the pithecus of Aristotle, otherwise
the Barbary macaque, more familiarly known as the
ape of the rock of Gibraltar, fossil remains of
macaques are found scattered all over the Continent,
and have even been unearthed as far north as Grays,
on the northern bank of the Thames. There is a
macaque (MZ. fuscatus) in Japan; and in the coldest
and least accessible forests of Eastern Tibet there is
a stump-tailed macaque (JZ. ¢2betanus) as well as the
Tibetan langur with the tip-tilted nose, which haunts
the forests between Moupin and Lake Khokonor,
where snow is on the ground for the greater portion
of the year. This langur (Semmnopithecus roxellane)
is one of the most historical of monkeys. In that
curious old Chinese book the Shan Hoc King, which
dates from something like 2205 B.c., there is a por-
trait of what is evidently a specimen of S. voxellana,
with the unmistakable turn-up nose that contrasts
so strikingly with the lengthy proboscis of Masalis
larvatus, the equally singular Bornean kahau. Mon-
keys, as a rule, are tropical animals; how they