48 MAMMALS

marmosets is long, hairy, and non-prehensile; the
thumb is long but not opposable, and the great toe
is rudimentary, all the fingers and toes being furnished
with pointed claws instead of the flat nails possessed
by all other monkeys. Another noteworthy point is
that the marmosets usually have three young ones at
a birth, while the rest of the monkeys have but one ;
but amongst them, as among all the others, a
youngster that loses its parents is always adopted
and brought up by some other family. There are
two genera of marmosets, those with short canine
teeth being assigned to Hapale, while those in which
the canines are longer than the incisors are assigned
to Midas. It is to Midas that those pretty creatures
the silky marmosets belong.

LEMUROIDEA.—Our next group is mainly
represented in Madagascar, though its distribution
extends between the tropics all the way from the
Philippines and Celebes to the West Coast of Africa.
In its living representatives it is so closely allied to
the monkeys that it is occasionally classed with them ;
in one form it is allied to the rodents, while in its
fossil forms it has obvious affinities not only with the
insectivores but with the ungulates. In Madagascar
it comprises quite half the mammalian fauna. All
of its representatives are arboreal, many of them are
nocturnal, and from their nocturnal habits they have
received the name of Lemuroids, demur being the
Latin for ‘ghost’ or ‘hobgoblin,’

The largest of the group is the indri, found on
the cast side of Madagascar. The sifakas belong to