LANGURS 37

who, during that war, bridged Palk Strait with the
rocks that his monkey troops threw into the sea. For
ages the hanuman monkeys have been considered
sacred by the Hindus, and allowed to amuse them-
selves at their own sweet will, much to man’s dis-
comfort ; but of late a check has been put to their
thefts and practical jokes, and they are no longer the
nuisances that they were. In the closely allied
Himalayan langur, the feet and hands are not so
black. Another langur is the negro monkey of Java,
which is black all over, except at the root of the tail
and below. The langurs are all Asiatic; in Africa
they are replaced by a somewhat similar genus, the
colobs, who, however, have no thumbs. Just as the
langurs have a black representative, so have the
colobs (Colobus satanas), who lives on the West
Equatorial coast. The handsomest of the colobine
monkeys are the guerezas, who live on the East
Coast.

One of the langurs—the banded-leaf monkey of
Malaysia—unlike the rest, has four tubercles in the
lower wisdom tooth, thereby resembling the next
group, the various species of Cercopithecus, which are
all African. The commonest of these are the greyish-
green South African vervet, with the blackish chin
and black-tipped tail; the olive-green North-East
African grivet, with the white chin and grey root to
the tail; and the West African green monkey, with
the yellowish whiskers. The next genus to Cerco-
pithecus is Cercocebus, comprising the white-eyelid
monkeys, or mangabeys, of which there are four
species, the most striking being C. fuliecnosus, the