ror BOYS anp GIRLS ade NON HPT HGH Event eM Budd S12 ect Ppleener HM Dye esse oye (ory tate Mom ROTI bad ELST OH be Hat: Pos hires tics met ALU Mteal saab ect taaerr tt esky Bel Brier aR Ted The Baldwin Library FIGHT BETWEEN AN ELEPHANT AND A TIGER POPULAR NATURA EIStORny FOR BOYS AND GIRLS BY W. J. GORDON AUTHOR OF ‘OUR COUNTRY’S BIRDS’ ‘HOW LONDON LIVES ETC. WITH EIGHTY-SIX ENGRAVINGS LONDON THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY 56 PATERNOSTER Row aNp 65 ST Paut’s CuurcuyarpD 1894 CONTENTS ANTHROPOIDEA Chimpanzee . Gorilla Orang Gibbons Monkeys Baboons Hanuman Langurs ’ Macaques Chacma Spider Monkeys Capuchin Monkeys pense : EMUROIDEA . Lemurs . Aye-aye CHIROPTER A Bats . Fox-Bat Insectivorous Bats Vampire Bat . INSECTIVORA . Shrews . Mole CARNIVORA . Lion. . Tiger SS nclal CHAPTER I MAMMALS PAGE 17, | CARNIVORA (ae) )— 19 Leopard . ; 22 | Ounce 27 Jaguar 29 Puma 32 | Cats . 33° | Civet 36 Hyeena 37 Dog 38 Wolf 40 | Jackal 43 | Fox . 44 | Brown Bear 47 Polar Bear 48 Grizzly Bear . 48 Black Bear 52 | Panda 54 Marten 54 |} Polecat . 56 Weasel 58 Skunk 64 Badger 64 Otter 66 Sea-Lion . 66 Sea-Bear 67 Walrus 70 Sea- pe 76 Seal 108 RODENTIA Squirrel Marmot Beaver Mouse . Rat . Porcupine Hare Rabbit . CETACEA Whales . Narwhal Dolphin Porpoise . UNGULATA Cattle Bison Bighorn Horned Sheep Goat. Antelope Giraffe Deer Elk . Reindeer Moose CARINAT AE Dipper . Song birds Nightingale Mocking-bird Skylark. Thrush : Birds of Paradise Woodpecker THumming-birds Parrots Owls Vultures Hawks . CONTENTS PAGE . 1 | UNGULATA (cont.)\— . III Camel : cele Liama . 114 Pig : B . 118 Hippopotamus . . 120 Tapir , . 120 Horse Bel 22 Zebra ., 122 Ass . . 123 Rhinoceros . 123 Hyrax . 127 Elephant . 129 | SZRENIA . 129 Manati . . 130 Dugong. . 133 | EDENTATA » 134 Sloth . 134 Ant-eater Bel o4 Armadillo . . 139 Pangolin . . 139 | MARSOPIALIA . ASTad ad Opossum - 145 Kangaroo . ‘ . 145 | MONOTREMATA . 148 | Duckmole . . 148 Echidna CHAPTER II BIRDS . 194 | CARINAT HAE (cont.)-— . 196 Pelicans : a . 196 Storks . 200 Flamingoes . 200 Geese - 201 Ducks » 201 Gulls . 202 Condor . 205 | RATITA. . 206 Ostrich . 206 Rhea . 207 Emu. . 207 Kiwi . 207 | SAURURA. PAGE - 149 - 154 - 154 . 156 . 158 - 159 . 161 . 162 . 162 . 167 . 168 - 173 » 174 » 174 » 175 - 175 . 176 . 177 . 178 » 179 . 180 . 182 . 184 . 185 . 186 . 208 . 208 . 208 . 208 . 208 . 209 . 210 . 215 . 216 . 216 . 216 . 216 . 217 CROCODILIA . Crocodiles. Gharials Alligators . OPHIDIA Rattlesnake Vipers Sea-Snakes Hamadryad Cobras ECAUDATA Frogs 3 Horned Frogs Toads TELEOSTEI Perch Bream Shad. Archer-fish Weevers Mackerel . Sword-fish Angler-fish Stickleback Cod . : Turbot . Herring Cat-fish . Carp. Salmon . CONTENTS CHAPTER III REPTILES PAGE - 219 | OPHIDIA (cont.)— . 219 Boas f . 220 Pythons : yee 221 | LACHER TTL Id + 222 Lizards . 225 Blindworm . 226 Chameleon . 226 | CHELONIA e227: Tortoises . . 227 Turtles . CHAPTER IV AMPHIBIANS - 235 | CAUDATA . » 235 Newt » 235 Salamander . 235 | APODA CHAPTER V FISHES » 240 | TELEOSTET (cont.)— . 241 Arapaima . » 241 Pilchard . 241 | Sardine 2A Qe Sea-horse - 242 | GANOIDES. e242 tel Sturgeon 224301 Pike . 246 | DIPNOT . 246 | Barramunda : - 247°, ELASMOBRANCA/ - 247 Sharks F . 247 Saw-fish PAY, Rays . 248 Skate « 248 Eagle-Ray vii PAGE . 228 . 228 . 228 . 228 . 230 . 230 . 230 - 231 ma2gr . 238 . 238 - 239 » 239 . 248 . 249 + 249 - 249 . 250 . 250 » 250 Zoid . 251 e252 . 252 » 254 » 255 » 255 » 255 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Giraffes ' PAGE Fight between an Elephant and a Tiger frontispiece A young Chimpanzee 14 _ The Gorilla : : 19 The White-collared Mangabey 38 The Red-faced Spider ro 45 Marmosets . 5 49 The Brown Mouse-Lemur 50 Skeleton of Bat. . : 55 The Collared Fruit-Bat . 57 Head of Long-eared Bat 59 Long-eared Bats F 60 Long-eared Bat sleeping 61 Barbastelle Bat walking . 62 Head of Vampire Bat 63 Water Shrews 65 Skeleton of a Lion 69 Lions 5 71 Lioness and Cubs 75 Leopards 78 A Puma 81 Eskimo Dogs 90 A Group of Fennecs . 92 The Polar Bear 95 The Grizzly Bear . 97 Grizzly Bear in a Aap 99 Black Bear IOI The Otter 103 The Walrus 105 The Northern Sea-Bear . . 109 The Russian Biying Pai » 115 Beavers Sly Field Voles . 119 Harvest Mice I2T The Porcupine . SIpl22) The Narwhal . 128 A School of Porpoises . 131 The American Bison - 135 The Musk Ox . . 136 The Alpine Ibex . 138 The Cabul Markhor . . 140 Head of Gemsbok. » 141 Water-Buck . 142 » 145 PAGE Reindeer . - 147 The Moose » 149 Camels . I51 Llamas . : - 153 The Hog-Deer of Celebes Beeesee ici The Common Hippopotamus . 157 Skull of the Hippopotamus . 158 Skeleton of the Horse . 160 Indian Rhinoceros - 163 The Hyrax or Coney - 168 The Great Ant-cater . . 176 Opossum with its Young . 181 Kangaroos . 183 The Duckmole . 185 Lawes’s Echidna . 187 The Ostrich . : . 188 Skeleton of a Bird . 190 Breastbone of Owl . I9QI Parts of a Bird . . 192 A Bird’s Leg . 193 The Dipper Tals The Nightingale =. 197, The Blackcap . 198 The Reed Warbler « 199 Shooting Birds of Paradise . 203 Weaver Bird and Nest . 204 The Nightjar. 205 The Sword-bill Humming- Bird 208 The Concave Hornbill . 207 The Griffon Vulture owe TT The Kiwi. ; . 217 Head of a Crocodile . 220 Head of a Gharial . 220 Head of an Alligator A221 The Tiger-snake of Australia . 223 Skeleton of a Python . 224 The Rattlesnake . 226 The Cobra di Capello o5 227, The Moloch Lizard . 229 The Matamata . 232 Transformations of the hi rog . 237 The Nest of the Stickleback . 245 The Hammer-headed Shark . 253 A BRIEF EXPLANATION OF SOME OF THE SCIENTIFIC TERMS USED IN THIS BOOK As the paraphrases adopted in many popular natural history books are more or less incorrect, it has been decided in the present volume to give the proper scientific terms. This compels the use of some- what long words, such as ‘anthropoidea,’ ‘carnivora,’ &c. To enable the young reader to understand exactly what these mean, a brief glossary is here given. It is hoped that this may help beginners to make an intelligent use of the book, and also afford pleasant exercise in the way of word study. Albinism, The absence of the usual colouring matters in the skin and its appendages. Anchylosis, The union of two bony surfaces by osseous or fibrous matter. Anoura. An old term for the tailless Amphibians. Anthropoidea. Those monkeys which most nearly approach man in form. Antlers, The horns of the deer. ; Agoda. Animals without limbs; the worm-like Amphibians. Artiodactyla. Ungulates having an even number of toes on their fect. Atavism. The recurrence of an ancestral peculiarity. Atrophied. Arrested in development at an early period of growth. Atlas. The vertebra of the neck which directly supports the skull. Axis. The second vertebra of the neck, on which the skull and atlas generally work. : Baleen. Whalebone. Batrachia. An old name for the Frogs, Toads, Salamanders, &c. Brachium. The upper arm. Branchia, The gill of a fish 3 an organ adapted for breathing the air dissolved in water. Bronchi. The branches of the windpipe by which air is conveyed to the lung vesicles. Bruta. An old name of the Edentates. Canide. Dog-like animals. Canine. The eye-tooth (see Dental Formula). Carinate. Birds with a sharp breast-bone, like a keel (cavéa). Carnassials, The flesh teeth of the Carnivores. Carnivora. The animals which feed on flesh. x BRIEF EXPLANATION OF SCIENTIFIC TERMS Carpus. The wrist. Catarrhine. Narrow-nosed; a term applied to the monkeys of the Eastern Hemisphere. Caudata. The tailed Amphibians, such as Newts and Salamanders. Cavicorns. The hollow-horned Ruminants, such as oxen and sheep. Cervical. Pertaining to the neck. Cetacea. The whales and dolphins. Chelonia. The tortoises, turtles, &c. Chiroptera. The hand-winged mammals ; that is to say, the Bats. Chordates. Animals having a spinal cord. Coleoptera. An order of insects including the beetles. Clavicles. The collar-bones ; the bones that together form the merry- thought in birds. Coccyx. The lower end of the spinal column. Condyle. The surface by which one bone articulates with another. Coracotd. The bone in the shoulder-girdle, which is a mere process of the scapula in mammals, but is well developed in birds. Coriaceous. Leathery. Costal. Pertaining to the ribs. Creodonta. Primitive carnivores, whose lower molar teeth are generally shaped like flesh-teeth. (See Dental Formula.) Cuspfidate. Waving small pointed elevations or ‘ cusps.’ Cutaneous. Pertaining to the skin. Dental Formula. A short method of describing the number and de- scription of the teeth. Adult man, for instance, has 32 teeth, of which 16 are in the upper jaw and 16 in the lower. Each set of 16 consists of 4 ‘incisors’ in front, then 2 ‘canines,’ one on each side, then 4 ‘premolars,’ 2 on each side, and then 6 ‘molars,’ being 3 on each side. As there are the same number of teeth in each half-jaw, the set can be briefly tabulated as incisors 2, canines 1, premolars 2, molars 3; or for upper and lower jaws 7. 2, c. 4, p.m. 2, m. %; but as the series is always in the same order the letters can be dispensed with, and the formula further abbreviated into 2428, In man both jaws have the same number of teeth, but this is not the case among all the mammals. The canines are fre- quently known as the eye-teeth, and the premolars as the bicuspids. Dermal. Pertaining to the integument, Dextral, Right-handed. Diastema. A gap, such as the interval in the jaw of the Ruminants. Diastole, The expansion of a contractile cavity. Didelphia, Another name for the Marsupials. Differentiation, The separation of parts which are united in siinpler forms of life. Digit. A finger or toe. Diphyodont, Waving two sets of teeth. Dipnot. Double-breathing fishes. Dorsal. Pertaining to the back. Ldentata, Mammals which have no front or incisor teeth, BRIEF EXPLANATION OF SCIENTIFIC TERMS xi Elasmobranchti. Fishes having gills like plates. Eocene. The lowest division of the Tertiary rocks. felide., Cat-like animals. femur. The thigh-bone. fibula. The outer bone of the leg. frssipeds. The carnivora in which the toes are divided, as among the cats and dogs. furculum. The merrythought, which is formed of the united clavicles. Ganoidet. Fishes which have enamelled bony scales. fabitat, The locality in which an animal naturally lives, fHfallux. The great toe. ffeterocercal. Unequally lobed. Humerus. The bone of the upper arm, 4fyoid. The bone which supports the tongue. Llium. The haunch bone. fnguinal. Pertaining to the groin. Lnsectivora. Animals which feed on insects. Lnvertebrata. Animals without a backbone. Lacertilia, Lizard-like animals (Zacertus, a lizard). Larynx. The upper part of the windpipe, from which the voice is produced in mammals. Lemuroidea. Animals of which the lemur is the type. Ligamentum nuche. The neck ligament which supports the head. Lingual. Pertaining to the tongue. Lumbar. Pertaining to the loins. Alammatia, The vertebrate animals which suckle their young. Mandible. The lower jaw. ~ Marsupialia. Mammals which carry their young in a pouch, like the kangaroo. : AMaxitila. The upper jaw. Alelanism, An excess of colouring matters in the skin and its appen- dages, thus producing blackness. Molars. The grinder teeth. Monophyodont. Waving only one set of teeth. Neural. Pertaining to the nerves. Nidification, _Nest-building. Notochord. The chorda dorsalis, a longitudinal cellular rod developed beneath the spinal cord, and replaced by the vertebral column in the adults of such animals as have a backbone. Odontoceti, The toothed whales. Bsophagus. The gullet. Oral. Pertaining to the mouth. Opposable. That which may be opposed. A word used incorrectly as descriptive of the power of the human subject to grip with the thumb and second digit. It is impossible to ‘ oppose’ these in the strict sense of the word, as the thumb must press sideways on the forefinger and cannot be twisted so as to get in front of it. An xii BRIEF EXPLANATION OF SCIENTIFIC TERMS ‘opposable toe’ is a great toe capable of being used in the way that a thumb is. Owing to the invention of boots and sandals, the great toe of man is now almost parallel in its action to that of the second toe, but among savage races like the Zulus the spears are picked up between the toes, and some of the natives of the West Coast of Africa have the great toe-joint still so flexible that they can use a hammer with their feet. Ophidia. Snake-like animals. Paleontology. The science of fossils. Paleozoic. The oldest group of stratified rocks. Patella. The knee-cap. Pelvis. The division of the skeleton which consists of the sacrum, coccyx, and haunch bones. Lerissodactyla. Ungulates having an odd number of toes in their feet. Pinnipeds. The Carnivores in which the toes are joined together, as for example, the seals. Plagiostomt. The fishes with the transverse mouths. Pleistocene. The most recent rocks of the Tertiary period. Platyrrhine. Broad-nosed; a term applied to the monkeys of the Western Hemisphere. Pollex. The thumb. Prehensile. Capable of grasping. Ramus. A half of the lower jaw. Ratite. Birds with a flat breast-bone, like a raft (vatzs). Rodentia. The animals that gnaw, sometimes called the Glres. Saurure. Birds with lizard-like tails. Only fossil specimens known. Ruminants. The animals that chew the cud. Sacrum. The triangular bone at the base of the vertebral column which forms the keystone of the pelvic arch. Scapula. The shoulder-bone. Simiide. Ape-like creatures (Greek. szvzos, ¢ flat-nosed ’). Sirenta. Mammals, like the dugong, that live in the water (from S2v€n). Sternum. The breast-bone. Tarsus. The ankle. Teleostez. The bony fishes. Thorax. The.chest. Tibia. The shin-bone. Ungulata. Animals which have hoofs. Ventral. Pertaining to the under surface of the vertebrates. Vertebrates. The animals having a backbone. Viviparous. Bringing forth the young alive. A YOUNG CHIMPANZEE POPULAR NATURAL HISTORY FOR BOYS AND GIRLS CEA Pl Resi MAMMALS THERE are over two million species of animals on this earth, and if we were merely to print their names, we should have to mass eight thousand of them on every page of this book. The numbers are, in fact, so appalling and incomprehensible that it is simply beyond human powers to realise the immensity and variety of the mighty Creation amid which we live. The wonderful is not necessarily the unknown ; in> the known we have the wonderful with us. The Creation has a long history, lost in the depths of ages marked by constant change and continuous life. The millions of forms that we know to-day are but as nothing in comparison with those which have vanished for ever in the onward march. Onward unrestingly has come the great army of the living, each form rising to suit its environment, and failing as its environment was modified; Nature 16 MAMMALS everywhere testifying to the infinity of its Author ; never a living form transmitting its unaltered like- ness to distant futurity, and yet nothing in the end which was not also in the beginning. Truly a wonderful world as it lies open to us, modelled and moulded, as a whole and in its least molecule, with grandeur, unfathomable intelligence, and inexhausti- ble bounty. During our lifetime our knowledge of animal life in the present and the past has largely increased, and the hard-and-fast frontier lines drawn by our fathers have in many cases been wiped away, and in others have been replaced by mere strips of debateable land. Even among the greater divisions which seemed so firmly established, many approximations have been made out. The fishes, for instance, have been found to be closely allied to the amphibians, the reptiles to the birds, and even the vertebrates as a whole have been shown to be so linked to the invertebrates that zoologists are abandoning the backbone as a basis of classification in favour of the spinal cord. Animals are now sorted into chordates, hemi-chordates and so on, and non-chordates ; the spinal cord in the chordates being along the back, and the heart being ventral, while the nerve cords of the non-chordates are along the belly or the sides, the heart being dorsal; the inter- mediate classes giving the intermediate stages in which the animal forms appear to have gradually turned upside down. On such technical details we need not, however, dwell in this little book ; we have merely mentioned them as illustrations of the ex- ANTHROPOIDEA i7 treme unwisdom of arguing on the undiscovered, and putting our trust in boundary lines. The one central fact is the unity of creation. The division into species-is merely a grouping of individuals, no two of which are exactly alike, made by man himself for his convenience in study and treatment. He groups individuals into varieties, varieties into species, species into genera, genera into families, families into orders, orders into classes, and at every stage is at the mercy of some fresh discovery, if he has been presumptuous enough to act upon the unknown. It is for this reason that natural-history books go out of date, for no classification is on a sound basis which is dependent on the assumed absence of certain features or forms. ANTHROPOIDEA.—From a man’s point of view the animais highest in the scale of life are those most like himself. He has a backbone, and con- sequently he considers animals with a backbone to _ be in a higher stage of development than those with- q out one. He is mammalian, and therefore puts the mammals at the head of the vertebrate series, with the birds on his flank, and the reptiles, amphibians, and fishes following after. And in this arrangement he is confirmed by the records of the rocks, which have yielded so many intermediate forms, and which— with their crowd of mammaliain their more recent beds, the first appearance of reptiles at an earlier age, of amphibians at a still earlier, of fishes at a still earlier, and the persistence of invertebrates throughout, with the obvious evidence of a gradual advance from the B 18 MAMMALS generalised to the specialised—have established the theory of his classification on so broad a basis that discussion as to the main question has practically ceased, and the conflict now rages around the secondary means. by which the changes have been brought about. Adopting, then, the usual plan, let us begin with the animals between whom and ourselves there is, as Sir Richard Owen said, ‘an all-prevailing similitude of structure’ which is unmistakable, and an external resemblance, particularly in their youth, which has in all parts of the world procured for them among savage races the local names of ‘wild men,’ ‘little men,’ ‘hairy men, &c, by which we in so many cases know them. In the front rank of these come the chimpanzees, the gorillas, the orangs, and the gibbons. These are ‘the man-like apes, the Szzéd@, which, with the old- world monkeys, the American monkeys, and the marmosets, form four out of five of the families of the man-like animals included in the order of Anthro- potdea ; the fifth family being the Homenide, to which man, the type of the order, belongs. Opinions differ as to which of the Szw#eczde@ should head the group. The gorillas are most like man in size, but the gibbons, which are not above three feet high, have a much more human-looking skull, without ridges or crests, and with a nearly upright forehead and a well-shaped chin. The gorilla’s arms reach half-way down his shins, but the arms of the gibbons are so long that they can touch their toes with their fingers as they walk ; and the gibbons can walk upright and THE GORILLA 19 flat-footed at all ages, while the gorilla rarely walks upright, except in infancy. In the structure of the brain the orangs are most like man; but in other respects, in the arms and hands and feet, and in the THE GORILLA jaws, the chimpanzees are so tnuch closer to the human type that it is usual to begin with them. There are two living species of chimpanzee now recognised, zzger (the black) and caluus (the bald), B2 20 MAMMALS both being natives of Western and Central Africa. The genus is known as Axthropopithecus, which means the man-monkey. Chimpanzee itself should really be written chimpa n’zee the n’see, being the word now rendered as n’tyigo, the chzmpa being descriptive of the sort of n’tyigo the natives wished to distinguish. The generic name used to be 7vog- lodytes, or ‘dwellers in caves, but this has gone the way of Quadrumana and other familiar terms, as being misleading when insisted upon too closely. The chimpanzee is, in fact, not a cave-dweller but a tree-dweller, and his home is a sort of platform, with or without a roof, which he makes in the trees for the shelter of his family. ‘ With regard to the arboreal habits of the gorilla, writes Dr. Garner, ‘I think they are somewhat misunderstood. He is a good climber and evidently spends much of his time in trees; but from an examination of his foot it is evident that he was designed for terrestrial habits. The grasping power of his foot is much less than that of the chim- panzee, and is not at all to be compared in this respect with his own hand; and all men whom I have consulted upon this point agree with me that he spends most of his life on the ground. During the time that I kept a young gorilla in the bush with me, I had also a chimpanzee ; and it was the daily habit of the chimpanzee to climb about in the bushes, while the gorilla rarely ever ascended one. I always kept a supply of food for them where they could easily secure it themselves at any time ; but the gorilla would seldom climb even a few feet from the ground to get himself a plantain, and when he did so, always THE CHIMPANZEE 2t descended again to the ground to eat it, whereas the chimpanzee would occasionally take a banana and climb into the bush to eat it. Both of these animals, however, and also the native, climb in much the same manner. They hold on to the sides of the tree with the hands, place the bottom of the foot obliquely on the side next to them, and walk up it, meanwhile depending in a great degree on the big toe. This toe, however, is very much larger in the chimpanzee than in man ; itis, indeed, like the thumb, one of the most variable characters of this group of animals, and in the marmosets is nearly wanting altogether. The chimpanzee squats on his heels, the gorilla sits down like a man, and sticks his legs out in front of him. The male chimpanzee is five feet high at the most, and the female is nearly as big, whereas the male gorilla, who may exceed six feet in height, is always much larger than the female. But the great difference is in the faces, that of the gorilla having the powerful brow-ridges which make him look so brutish and ferocious, which ridges, like the crest on the top of the skull, are almost absent in the females and their young, and only grow into prominence as the males approach maturity. The chimpanzees have their eyebrows much less marked in both sexes, and are altogether of more graceful build and pleasanter appearance. ‘Sally, who lived for eight years at the Zoological Gardens in the, Regent’s Park, was one of the bald species. The experiments made on her by Dr. Romanes are well known. She was apparently about 22 MAMMALS as intelligent as a child might be within the last few months of infancy, and had some notion of numbers up to ten; but as far as her ‘language’ was dis- coverable, it was limited to three sounds, one doing duty for ‘Yes, another for ‘No, and another for ‘Thank you so much!’ She may, however, have realised that ‘a still tongue makes a wise head ;’ at any rate, like the little black chimpanzee now in her place, she looked wise enough, particularly when boys attempted to amuse themselves at her expense. The gorilla (Gorlla Savage?) is so called after its native name, the name of the species being in honour of Dr. Savage, an English missionary in the Gaboon country, who in 1847 sent drawings of its skull to Sir Richard Owen. Du Chaillu published his account of his discovery of this huge ape in 1861, but in 1860 there was a real live gorilla in this country in a travelling show, whose proprietor was unaware of the curiosity he possessed until after it was dead. The gorilla is heavily built, as can be seen by the skeletons in the top gallery at the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, but this heaviness has been exaggerated in most of the published woodcuts. Like man and the chimpanzees, he has seventeen joints in his backbone; but while man has twelve ribs, he and the chimpanzees have thirteen. Another point in which he resembles the chimpanzees is in the absence of the ‘central’ bone in the wrist, which is only found exceptionally in adult man. His teeth, too, though similar in number and variety, are very different in appearance from a man’s, owing to the large size of the canines and wisdom teeth. PEDIGREE OF GORILLA 23 In these comparisons with the human skeleton, in this ‘stating of the animal kingdom in the terms of man, it should be borne in mind that we are only dealing with anatomical facts, and that it is not im- plied, as the ignorant suppose, that man is descended from any of the existing chimpanzees or gorillas or orangs or gibbons. No one, indeed, ever said so, the statement having been put about by heated dis- putants in their attempts to destroy the unwelcome by mere derision. The pedigree of the Homznide must be taken back for an enormous period of time before it touches the crossways whence that of the man-like apes diverged fromit. But those crossways it unmistakably reaches. Man is so intimately con- nected, as far as his bodily structure goes, with the higher apes that, as Mr. Lydekker says in 7ze Royal Natural History, ‘in this respect at least he cannot but be considered to have had a similar origin.’ There is really no fundamental distinction in anatomy between any member of the man-like group, and they can only be regarded as diverging branches from some ancestral form long since extinct, as much unlike any living ape as such apes are un- like man. Of course, much depends on what is meant by man, but in a zoological sense the Homznzd@ seem to have been distinct from the Szszz¢de for at least as long ago as the Miocene period of the earth’s exist- ence.. This, it need hardly be said, has nothing to do with the spiritual nature, nor even with the mental powers and other human attributes, which so far remove man from the brutes. ‘Viewed from the 24 MAMMALS anatomical standpoint, says Professor Mivart, ‘man is but one species of the order Primates; and he even differs far less from the higher apes than do these latter from the inferior forms of the order. This work being purely anatomical, it is only needful here to remind the reader of what common-sense teaches us—that to estimate any object as a whole, its powers of action no less than its structure must be taken into consideration. The structure of the highest plants is more complex than is that of the lowest animals; but for all that, powers are possessed by jelly-fishes of which oaks and cedars are devoid. The self-conscious intelligence of man establishes between him and all other animals a distinction far wider than the mere superiority of his brain in mass and complexity, or any other physical difference, would indicate. ~All, however, who admit the idea of man’s moral responsibility are logically compelled to go much further, and to confess that in this respect he is separated from the rest of the visible creation by an abyss so vast that no chasm separating the other kingdoms of nature from one another can be compared with it.’ The words of the Psalmist, taken in their ordinary signification, are as eloquent as they are true: ‘When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained ; What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that Thou visitest him? For Thou hast made him but little lower than the angels, and crownest him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands ; BRAIN OF A GORILLA 25 Thou hast put all things under his feet : all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field ; the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.’ The frame of man differs but little from that of the living things around him, but his dominion over them is palpable and undeniable. Year by year those that might contest it with him, were it a matter of structure alone, are edged away. The monsters of the past and the present, the carnivores, the serpents, every possibly dominant form of the air and land and sea, struggle in vain against his superiority. And every wild animal or wild plant that he judges in his ignorance to be ‘of no use’ he dooms to extinction as ‘vermin’ or ‘ weeds.’ In mere weight of brain he is a long way above those he most resembles. The gorilla’s brain is only two-thirds that of the smallest human brain—in fact, a man may have a brain three times as heavy as that of the gorilla. The average human brain weighs just under 50 ounces ; that of the gorilla does not exceed 20 ounces. The cranial capacity. is never less than 55 cubic inches in any normal man or woman, while in the chimpanzee it is but 274 cubic inches, and in the orang it is less. This preponderance of brain is the one great anatomical distinction between him and the brutes, whom he resembles in every bone and muscle, nerve and blood-vessel, and from whom the eighty vestigial structures in his muscular, skeletal, and other systems—things obviously of no use to him and only valuable as illustrations in hospital practice— render it impossible to admit his physical separation. 26 MAMMALS There are said to be two species of gorilla, one brownish and blackish, the other having a yellow face when young ; but only one is at present generally re- cognised by zoologists, the n’jena of West Equatorial Africa, from which came the nickname ‘Gena’ given to the Crystal Palace specimen in which the Rev. J. G. Wood was so much interested. The gorilla’s limbs are much longer than those of a man, and he is the biggest of the man-like group, and the only one ex- cept man with anything like a calf to his leg. There was a gorilla in Berlin which died of consumption in 1877, after fifteen months of captivity. On this animal a good many observations were made, with the result that he seemed to be of about the same standard of intelligence as the more familiar chimpanzee. Some .of his traits were peculiarly childish. On the voyage home, when he felt a longing for sugar or fruit, which was kept in the dining saloon, he would slip in there when he thought no one was looking and go straight to the cupboard, make a quick and dexterous snatch at the sugar basin or fruit basket, and close the cup- board door behind him before beginning to enjoy his _ plunder, and if he were discovered he would cut and run with his booty much as a naughty boy might do with an apple, his whole behaviour making. it clear that he was conscious of doing wrong. He also took a special pleasure in making a noise by beating on hollow things, and never missed an opportunity of drumming on casks, dishes, or tin trays. This habit of amusing himself has been de- scribed by Dr. Garner as characteristic of the gorilla in his native forests. One he describes as beating ORANGUTAN O77, with his hands ‘alternately, and with great rapidity, and not unlike the manner in which the natives beat a drum, except that each hand made the same number of strokes, and the strokes were in a constant series, rising and falling from very soft to very loud, and wice versd; and a number of these runs followed one another during the whole time that the voicé continued. Between the first and second strokes the interval was slightly longer than between the second and third, and so on. As the beating increased in loudness the intervals shortened in a corresponding degree, whereas in the diminuendo the intervals lengthened as the beating softened, and the author of the sounds seemed conscious of this fact. I could not, however, trace any relation in time or harmony between the music and the beating, except that they usually began at the same time and ended at the same time ; but the voice suddenly stopped at the very climax of the sounds, whereas the beating was stopped at any part of the scale. I have no doubt that the gorilla sometimes beats his breast, and he has been seen to do so in captivity ; but I do not think it follows that he is confined to that.’ There are at least three living species of orang, all of them found in Sumatra and Borneo, the one generally known to us being Szmda satyrus. Orang is the Malay for ‘man, and wtan, which is com- monly coupled with it, is merely the Malay for ‘ of the woods. The orang is distinguished from the gorilla and chimpanzee in being a reddish animal, and he also has eight bones in his wrist instead of seven. His arms are long, and his knees turn out- 28 MAMMALS ward, so that he walks on the outside of his feet, much as a boy does who treads his boots down. His forehead is a high one, by no means so retreating as in the gorillas and chimpanzees, and he has no ridges to speak of over his eyes. His canine tecth are very large, and, although he has twelve ribs like man, he has only sixteen joints in his backbone. A. fossil orang has been found in Northern India, and a close ally, the Dryopithecus (which simply means ‘monkey of the woods’), inhabited Western Europe in Miocene times. In Borneo the orang is generally known as the mias, and under this name has been fully described by Dr. A. R. Wallace. Dr. Wallace says that ‘he walks deliberately along some of the larger branches in the semi-erect attitude which the great length of his arms and the shortness of his legs cause him naturally to assume ; and the disproportion between these limbs is increased by his walking on his knuckles, not on the palm of the hand, as we should do. Henever jumps or springs or seems to hurry him- self, and yet manages to get along almost as quickly as a person can run through the forest beneath,’ Like the gorilla and chimpanzee, he has the habit of twisting together the smaller branches, so as to make a platform on which to rest, and on one occa- sion a large mias, which had not only been mortally wounded, but had one of his arms broken by a rifle bullet, succeeded in a wonderfully short time in con- structing a platform which, besides concealing him from sight, was strong enough to sustain the weight of his heavy body after he was dead. GIBBONS 29 Orangs have been known in captivity in Europe for over a hundred years. In 1776 there was one living in the menagerie of the Prince of Orange. All the captive specimens have impressed their keepers by their intelligence. Leuret gives a remarkable in- stance of this. ‘One of the orangs,’ he says, ‘which recently died at the menagerie, was accustomed, when the dinner-hour had come, to open the door of the room where he took his meals in company with several persons. As he was not sufficiently tall to reach as high as the key of the door, he hung on to a rope, balanced himself, and, after a few oscillations, very quickly reached the key. His keeper, who was rather worried by so much exactitude, one day took occasion to make three knots in the rope, which, having thus been made too short, no longer permitted the orang to seize the key. The animal, after an in- effectual attempt, recognising the nature of the obstacle which opposed his desire, climbed up the rope, placed himself above the knots, and untied all three. The same ape wishing to open a door, his keeper gave _ him a bunch of fifteen keys; the ape tried them in turn till he found the one he wanted. Another time a bar of iron was put into his hands, and he made use of it as a lever” Cuvier, too, had an orang which used to drag a chair from one end of a room to the other, in order to stand upon it so as to reach a latch he desired to open. The last genus of the Szmdide is that to which the gibbons belong. These are the only apes, as already mentioned, who habitually walk upright, and keep their balance with their arms in any position, 30 MAMMALS They inhabit the Malay Peninsula and its neighbour- hood, and though in some respects very like man in structure, they are in others rather closely allied to the baboons. Their generic name, /7ylobates, means ‘tree-traveller,’ and in habits they are essentially arboreal, living in large companies among the branches, swinging through wonderful distances, and indulging in loud and almost musical cries as they leap along. ‘Among the branches, says the Rev. J. G. Wood, ‘it would be as easy to catch a swallow on the wing as the gibbon. The cry of the agile gibbon is a very remarkable one, consisting of the chromatic scale very rapidly rendered, and concluded by a couple of barks, one an octave below the other. One of these creatures, which was kept tame for some time, was placed in a large room in which branches were fixed at some distance from each other, so as to represent the boughs of a tree. Eighteen feet was the longest space between the branches, and through this space she would launch herself, uttering her chromatic cry, and catching, while in mid-air, fruit or cake that was thrown to her.” One of the gibbons at the Calcutta Zoological Gardens, a hoolock, was in the habit of catching birds on the wing that flew into his cage. There are several species of gibbon, the best known being the siamang, the lar or white-handed gibbon, the hoolock, with the white frontal band, which is the only species occurring in India, the agile gibbon, and the silver gibbon. They have all been kept in confinement, and many stories are told of their affectionate dis- position. ‘I keep in my garden,’ says one writer, ‘a ANECDOTE OF A GIBBON 3t number of gibbons (Aylobates agilis). They live quite’ free from all restraint in the trees, merely coming when called to be fed. One of them, a young male, on one occasion fell from a tree and dislocated his wrist ; it received the greatest attention from the others, especially from an old female, who, however, was no relation. She used, before eating her own plantains, to take up the first that were offered to her every day and give them to the cripple, who was living in the eaves of a wooden house; and I have frequently noticed that a cry of fright, pain, or dis- tress from one would bring all the others at once to the complainer, and they would then condole with him and fold him in their arms.’ But this sympathy is quite in accordance with the character of all the Anthropoddea. In them, as Romanes observes, ‘affection and sympathy are strongly marked, the latter, indeed, more so than in any other animals, not even excepting the dog’ It is at least significant that the animals whose infancy is prolonged—that is, with whom the mother’s care lasts longest—are almost invariably the gentlest and most intelligent ; for it is quite a mistake to suppose that apes or monkeys are of inferior intelligence to dogs, or elephants, or horses. By a confusion of thought, docility is mistaken for intelligence, and intelligence measured by the ease with which it can be adapted to the service of man. The negro’s faith- fulness as a slave is no testimony to the superiority of his intellectual powers over those of the Arab or the European. Next to the Szmzidz, on the downward track, 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 BABOONS 33 manage to exist through the long, cold winters of the Asiatic highlands is somewhat of a mystery. There are monkeys all over America, from the Rio Grande do Sul in 30° south latitude to Vera Cruz in Mexico, where the black-handed spider species is - found at an elevation of 2,000 feet on the slopes of Orizaba, and of 4,000 feet in Oajaca. Using the _term in its generally accepted sense, there are mon- keys right across Asia, from the Hainan gibbon on the east to the Arabian baboon on the west. This _ Arabian baboon is better known on the other side of the Red Sea as the sacred baboon of the old _Egyptians, although it is now not found in -Egypt, but further south in Abyssinia and the Soudan. Sacred as it was, it would seem, at least occasionally, to have been put to some use. On one of the old bas-reliefs there is a fruit-bearing sycamore, in the branches of which are three monkeys, easily recog- nisable as Arabian baboons from their long snouts, well-developed tails, and thickly haired shoulders and necks ; on either side of the tree are two slaves, with baskets laden with sycamore figs, and these baskets they are filling with the figs handed down by the baboons. It thus appears that the ancient Egyptians had succeeded in training these animals to gather fruits and hand them to their masters, precisely after the fashion that the modern Malays are said to have trained a langur in Sumatra to perform a similar kind of ‘service, the fruit in the one case being Sycamore figs and in the other cocoanuts. The common long-tailed monkeys of the Egyptian sculp- tures, it may be as well to note, were either guenons or Cc 34 MAMMALS mangabeys, probably guenons, which were well known in Rome and Athens under the name of Cebus, which now does duty as the generic designation of an American family. There are monkeys in many of the Asiatic islands. In the Nicobars, as well as on the Arakan coast, there is that remarkable animal the crab-eating macaque, which has forsaken the usual simian food in favour of a diet of crabs and insects, and frequents the tidal creeks and rivers in family parties of half a dozen or more, swimming and diving as readily asa man. In Sumatra there are a large number of species; but then, Sumatra is a haunt of the orang, and the special home of the siamang, the largest of the long-armed gibbons, whose morning and evening observances attracted the attention of Duvaucel. ‘Siamangs,’ he says, ‘generally assemble in numerous troops, con- ducted, it is said, by a chief whom the Malays believe to be invulnerable, probably because he is more agile, powerful, and difficult to reach than the rest. Thus united, they salute the rising and setting sun with the most terrific cries, which may be heard at several miles’ distance ; and which, when near, deafen when they don’t frighten. This is the morning call to the mountain Malays, but to the inhabitants of the towns it is a most insupportable annoyance,’ In Java lives the wou-wou, or silver gibbon, its congener the agile gibbon being found as far north as the Sulu Islands, between the Philippines and Borneo. In Borneo, monkey life is well represented, from the orang downwards, and one species, Hose’s langur, haunts the woods at elevations up to 4,000 feet AFRICAN BABOONS 35 on the side of the chief mountain, Kina Balu. From Celebes farther eastward, and from the small island of Batchian more eastward still, comes the black ape, which gives the connecting link between the macaques and true baboons. The true baboons are exclusively African, with the exception of the Arabian species on the Red Sea littoral. On the West Coast are the drill and man- drill, the papio, and the anubis; on the East Coast, and extending right across, is the yellow baboon ; and in the south is the chacma, found in all the mountain ranges of Cape Colony, living in droves of thirty or more, even in the country about Simon’s Bay and in the tract stretching down to Cape Point. There are monkeys all over Africa, from the Somali- land nisnas to the Senegambian patas, from the Barbary macaque to the Cape vervet. Even 3,000 feet up the slopes of Kilima-njaro there is a guereza ; and a fine fellow he is, with a long silky mantle and a brush to his tail that would not disgrace a yak. But that we know all the African species is very unlikely ; for Africa has been but little worked as far _ asits simian fauna is concerned. Sportsmen as a rule care little for such troublesome things as monkeys. The differences between the monkeys, strictly so called, and the anthropoid apes are not so very great. None of the anthropoids has a tail, but although the monkeys generally have tails, their tails are of dif- ferent lengths, and some have no tail at all. There is one characteristic, however, which is worth noting, and that is that no Old-World monkey hangs on by his tail as some of the Americans do, There isa C2 36 MAMMALS certain difference in the breast-bone marking the monkeys off from the anthropoids. In the monkeys it is narrow and flattened from side to side, instead of being broad and flattened from back to front. All the monkeys, too, have eight bones in the wrist, like the orang and the gibbons. Like the anthro- poids, the Old-World monkeys have thirty-two teeth, the ‘dental formula’—that is, the arrangement of the teeth—being the same as in man, whereas the -Americans have thirty-six teeth. The American monkeys also differ from the rest in not having an opposable thumb—a fact of little importance, but worth remembering owing to the stress that was once laid on the fact that civilised man had not an opposable great toc. The family of Old-World monkeys is known as Cercopithecid@,which means‘monkeyswith tails’ (which is not quite the case), and these are divided into Cercopithecine, which have check-pouches, and the legs and arms fairly equal, and Sesnopithecine (sacred monkeys), which have no cheek-pouches, and have the legs longer than the arms. The type of species of the latter family is the sacred monkey of India (Semnopithecus entellus), otherwise known as the hanuman, which can be distinguished from the rest of the group by his black feet and hands, his hair sticking out over his brow like a pent-house, his tail, like those of his nearest of kin, being longer than his head and body put together. Hanuman, it may be remembered, was the fabulous monkey who was such friends with Vishnu in the expedition to Ceylon to recover Sita from the giant Ravana, and he it was 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 38 MAMMALS prettiest being C. collar¢s, with the white collar. . The mangabeys all come from West Africa; they are the most grimaceful of monkeys, and have a curious habit of turning up their tail as they walk, as if they were endeavouring to tickle their nose with it. The macaques are Asiatic. They are heavier in build than the mangabeys, and have much more pro- jecting faces, though among them the nose is never THE WHITE-COLLARED MANGABEY as far forward as the mouth. Some of them have long tails, some of them short tails; one of them has no tail at all, the tail, for sorting purposes, being now treated as a ‘negligeable quantity.’ They all re- semble each other in gestures and voice, and appa- rently have a rudimentary language. According to Colonel Tickell, anger is generally silent amongst them, ‘or, at most, expressed by a low hoarse ew, not ae ANECDOTE OF A BONNET-MONKEY 39 so gular or guttural as a growl; ennui and a desire for company by a whining fom; invitation, depre- cation, entreaty, by a smacking of the lips and a display of the incisors into a regular broad grin, accompanied with a subdued grunting chuckle, highly expressive, but not to be rendered on paper; fear and alarm by a loud, harsh shriek—&ra or kraouak —which serves also as a warning to the others, who may be heedless of danger.’ Unlike the langurs and gibbons, they have no call. Among the many macaques, we may mention the bonnet-monkey (Macacus sinicus), so called from the patch of blackish hair on the forehead, which is care- fully parted in the middle. Mr. Wood describes one of these animals he met with at the seaside, in charge of the usual organ-man. ‘Apparently of its own accord, the monkey had taught itself to imitate the actions of the children who play on the sands, and seemed to derive the keenest gratification from imi- tating their proceedings. The owner allowed it to roam about as much as it liked, and often it was the centre of an admiring throng of children, who were treating it as if it were a pet kitten, the owner all the while contemplating the group with a broad grin on his good-humoured countenance. I was first attracted to the children by their shricks of laughter, which were occasioned by the business-like way in which the bonnet-monkey was washing a handkerchief in a little pail of sea-water. In spite of the preternatural gravity with which the monkey went through the operations of washing, shaking, and hanging out to dry, it was evident that the animal enjoyed the game as much as 40 MAMMALS the children, and was always ready to wash any handkerchief that was given him. I rather thought that, monkey-like, he would have bitten or torn the handkerchiefs ; but he never injured one of them, treating them with as much respectful care as if he were employed by a Chinese laundryman, who is a model of self-contained gravity when engaged in getting up linen,’ Closely allied to this species is the Singalese rilawa, AZ. pileatus, which the Tamil conjurors teach to dance, and carry from village to village clad in a grotesque dress to amuse the people, in just the same way as its relative amuses our children; but, as Mr. Lydekker says, ‘the mimicry and amusing tricks of a monkey in captivity are a mere shadow of what they are in its native condition, so that persons who have only seen these animals in confinement have but a faint idea of their true nature. Another common macaque is the rhesus, or bandar, carried about by the jugglers in Northern India. The tailless macaque is the Gibraltar ape, which crossed into Europe before the straits were formed, and is also found in Morocco and Algiers, being the only member of the genus that is not Asiatic. The series of intermediate forms leading through the guenons, mangabeys and macaques to the baboons is now practically complete. The baboons are an ugly lot, easily distinguishable by their dog-like heads, which have given them their generic name of Cynocephalus (dog-headed). They are the biggest of the monkeys, and have exceptionally big heads. One of the best looking is the South African chacma, THE CHACMA AI otherwise the pig-like one, C: porcarius. The chacma is not a foe to be despised. According to Mrs. Martin, no vegetable poison has the slightest effect on his iron constitution ; and, indeed, if there exists any poison at all capable of killing him, it is quite certain that, with his superior intelligence, he would be far too artful to take it; and where the fiat for his de- struction has gone forth, a well-organised attack has to be made on him with dogs and guns. He can show fight, too, and the dogs must be well trained and have the safety of numbers to enable them to face him ; for in fighting he has the immense advan- tage of hands, with which he seizes a dog and holds him fast while he inflicts a fatal bite through his loins. Indeed, for either dog or man to come to close quarters with Adonis (as the chacma is ironically called by. the Boers) is no trifling matter. ‘One of our friends, travelling on horseback, came upon a number of baboons sitting in solemn parliament on some rocks. He cantered towards them, anticipating seeing the ungainly beasts take to their heels in grotesque panic; but was somewhat taken aback on finding that, far from being intimidated by his ap- proach, they refused to move, and sat waiting for him, regarding him the while with ominous calmness. The canter subsided into a trot, and the trot into a sedate walk, and still they sat there ; and so defiant was the expression on each ugly face that at last the intruder thought it wisest to turn back and ride igno- miniously away.’ But the baboons have another side to their nature. Not long ago there was at the Iondon Zoological 42 MAMMALS Gardens, according to Dr. Romanes, an Arabian baboon, C. kamadryas, and an Anubis baboon, C. - anubts, confined in one cage, adjoining that which contained another baboon. The Anubis baboon passed its hand through the wires of the partition in order to purloin a nut which the large baboon had left within reach. The Anubis baboon very well knew the danger he ran, for he waited until his bulky neighbour had turned his back upon the nut with the appearance of having forgotten all about it, and, of course, pounced on the Anubis when temptation proved too strong for caution, and bit him severely. ‘The Anubis baboon then retired to the middle of the cage, moaning piteously, and holding his injured hand against his chest while he rubbed it with the other one. The Arabian baboon now approached him from the top of the cage, and, while making a sooth- ing sound very expressive of sympathy, folded the sufferer in its arms—exactly as a mother would her child under similar circumstances. It must be stated also that this expression of sympathy had a decidedly quieting effect upon the sufferer, his moans becoming less piteous as soon as he was enfolded in the arms of his comforter; and the manner in which he laid his cheek upon the bosom of his friend was as expres- sive as anything could be of sympathy appreciated.’ In the Cedide, the chief group of the American monkeys, the nose is flat and has a broad inter-narial septum, while the thumb, though not opposable, is divergent from the fingers, except in the spider- monkeys, in which it is rudimentary. All the American monkeys live in the forests, ‘In this THE WOOLLY SPIDERS 43 purely arboreal life, says Mr. Lydekker, ‘it will easily be seen that the prehensile tail of those species which possess such an organ must be of great assist- ance to their owners in travelling from bough to bough, and thus from tree to tree. Considering, how- ever, that the species, like the titis, in which the tail is not prehensile, are equally as arboreal in habits as those with prehensile tails, it is quite clear that the latter organ can only be regarded as a kind of luxury. Indeed, the whole question as to the reason why some monkeys have long tails, others short tails, and others, again, no tails at all, is in- volved in great obscurity.’ There are ten genera of the Cebide—the capu- chins, Cebus (Cebus is.merely a derivative of the Greek ebos, meaning a monkey); the - woolly monkeys, Lagothrix; the woolly spider-monkeys, Eriodes ; the spider-monkeys, A¢e/es ; the owl-faced monkeys, Vyctipithecus ; the squirrel-monkeys, Chry- Sothrix; the titis, Callthrix; the sakis, Pzthecza ; the uakaris, Uacaria;,and the howlers. The capu- chins have thickish tails, with no bare patch at the end of the tail, where it is used for clinging to the trees ; in fact, if the tail be looked upon as a third hand, it is in this genus a hand without a palm. In the woolly monkeys this patch is present, and con- spicuous owing to the thickness of the fur everywhere else. The woolly spiders connect them with the spiders properly so-called. They are of much lighter build, and have long, narrow tails and rudimentary thumbs. The spiders live almost all their time in the trees, but now and then they come to the ground A4 MAMMALS for a run, standing on their hind legs, holding their arms up in the air, and bending their tails up into a double curve. The owl-faced monkeys, or dourou- colis, have very long tails, but the tails are not pre- hensile ; neither are those of the squirrels, or saimaris, and the titis, which are often classed together. These monkeys are much smaller as a rule than any of the preceding, and they vary very much in the length of their tails. The sakis also do not have prehensile tails; the uakaris have hardly any tail at all, but the howlers have very long tails and these are prehensile. On the tail alone they would be classed next to the spiders ; but the expansion of the hyoid bone, which particularly distinguishes them, is so clearly foreshadowed among the titis and sakis that these genera have to be placed between. This bone, which joins on to the upper part of the wind- pipe, is a most extraordinary-looking thing ; there are some good specimens of it in the Kensington Natural History Museum—bony bags as thin as paper and as large as an ordinary wine-glass, a mouth-organ of great capacity for the production of the exasperating music which has given the genus the name of MMycetes, or moaners. The best known of the capuchins is perhaps the brown one (C. fatuellus),a representative of which was experimented on by Dr. Romanes, who published the diary of the proceedings in his Amdmal Intelli- gence. We must find room for an extract from this most interesting record. ‘To-day he obtained posses- sion of a hearth-brush, one of the kind which has the handle screwed into the brush. He soon found the THE RED-FACED SPIDER MONKEY 46 MAMMALS way to unscrew the handle, and having done that, he immediately began to try to find out the way to screw it in again. This he in time accomplished. At first he put the wrong end of the handle into the hole, but turned it round and round the right way for screwing. Finding it did not hold, he turned the other end of the handle and carefully stuck it into the hole, and began again to turn it the right way. It was of course a very difficult feat for him to per- form, for he required both his hands to hold the handle in the proper position, and to turn it between his hands in order to screw it in, and the long bristles of the brush prevented it from remaining steady or with the right side up. He held the brush with his hind hand, but even then it was very difficult for him to get the first screw to fit into the thread. He worked at it, however, with the most unwearying per- severance until he got the first turn of the screw to catch, and he then quickly turned it round and round until it was screwed up to the end. The most re- markable thing was that, however often he was dis- appointed in the beginning, he never was induced to try turning the handle the wrong way; he always screwed it from right to left. As soon as he had accomplished his wish he unscrewed it again, and then screwed it in again, —and amused himself till he was tired. ‘The desire to accomplish a chosen task,’ continues the diarist, ‘seems a sufficient inducement to lead him to take any amount of trouble. This seems a very human feeling, such as is not shown, I believe, by any othet animal. It is not the desire of praise, as he never notices people looking on; it is MARMOSETS 47 simply the desire to achieve an object for the sake of achieving an object, and he never rests nor allows his attention to be distracted until it is done. This monkey also found out how to open boxes with keys, and did other noteworthy things. His rapidity of discernment was very striking. When he went back to the Zoological Gardens he always instantly re- cognised the friends among whom he had spent his holiday. ‘I purposely, says the doctor, ‘visited the monkey-house on Easter Monday, in order to see whether he would pick me out of the solid mass of people who fill the place on that day. Although I could only obtain a place three or four rows back from the cage, and although I made no sound where- with to attract his attention, he saw me almost im- mediately, and with a sudden intelligent look of recognition ran across the cage to greet me. When I went away he followed me, as he always did, to the extreme end of his cage, and stood there watching my departure as long as I remained in sight,’ The last and the smallest of the man-like animals are the Hapalide or marmosets. Unlike the other American monkeys, these have the same number of teeth as man, although the arrangement is different, there being three premolars and two molars, instead of two premolars and three molars. Like all the rest of the order, they have two incisors and one canine. Of course we have taken it as generally known that the dental formula of man is 2, 1, 2, 3, the first three figures, the important ones, being easily rememberable as giving the boiling-point of water. The tail of the 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 MARMOSETS 50 MAMMALS another genus (Propithecus) and are all curiously local and limited, each distinct species being characteristic of a distinct area. The avahis or woolly lemurs, unlike the indris and sifakas, are found either THE BROWN MOUSE-LEMUR solitary or in pairs. The true lemurs have more teeth than the others; the gentle lemur belongs to a different genus (Hapalemur) distinguishable by the more rounded head and shorter muzzle; the weasel- LEMURS 51 lemurs have either no upper front incisors at all or only rudimentary ones; the mouse-lemurs are hardly larger than rats, and are remarkable for re- maining dormant during the hottest period of the year. The brown mouse-lemur (of which we give the portrait) was brought to England by Mr. Shaw, the well-known missionary. The dwarf mouse-lemur is the animal Buffon described as the rat of Mada- gascar ; it builds nests of twigs as if it were a rook, and lines them with hair. The galagos are found on the African mainland; the large size of their ears sufficiently distinguishes them ; they are found practically all over Africa, and have been known for the last hundred years. The two genera Wycticebus and Lords are Asiatic; Perodicticus, which includes the potto and awantibo, is exclusively African. In earlier times the group hada much wider distribution, fossil representatives having been found not only in England and France but in North America. There are two other families of the lemuroids besides the Lemuride. These are the Zarsizde and the Chiro- myid@, each represented by a single genus and a single species. The Tarsier derives its name from the frog-like elongation of its ankle bones. In his Crudse of the Marchesa, Dr. Guillemard says of one obtained at Celebes :—‘ The most interesting addition to our mena- gerie was a tiny lemuroid animal, brought to us by a native, by whom it was said to have been caught upon the mainland. These little creatures, which are of arboreal and nocturnal habits, are about the size of a small rat, and are covered with a remarkably thick fur, D2 eo MAMMALS which is very soft. The tail is long, and covered with hair at the root and tip, while the middle portion of it is nearly bare. The eyes are enormous, and, indeed, seem, together with the equally large ears, to constitute the greater part of the face, for the jaw and nose are very small, and the latter is set in, like that of a pug dog, almost at a right angle. The hind-limb at once attracts attention from the great length of the tarsal bones, and the hand is equally noticeable for its length, the curious claws with which it is provided, and the extraordinary disc-shaped palps on the palmar surface of the fingers, which probably enable the animal to retain its hold in almost any position. ° This weird-looking creature we were unable to keep long in captivity, for we could not get it to eat the cockroaches which were almost the only food with which we could supply it. It remained still by day in its darkened cage, but at night, especially if dis- turbed, it would spring vertically upwards in an odd mechanical manner, not unlike the hopping of a flea. On the third day it found a grave in a pickle- bottle.’ The aye-aye is quite as curious, with its rodent- like incisors, its absence of tusks, and its attenuated middle claw, with which it extracts from their burrows the larve which are its natural food. In appearance it is not unlike a cat with a large bushy tail and rounded ears. ‘It is no wonder, says Mr. Shaw, ‘that in connection with so curious an animal a number of superstitious beliefs should be current among the Betsimisaraka, in whose country the aye- aye is principally found. In reference to its name, THE AYE-AYE 53 one account says that the first discoverers took it from one part of the island to another, the inhabi- tants of which had never seen it, and in their surprise they exclaimed “Hay! Hay!” Another tale is that, many years ago, some Betsimisaraka had occasion to open an old tomb, in which had been buried one of their ancestors. No sooner was the tomb opened than this animal, into which the said ancestor had developed, sprang out, and hence the exclamation of surprise that has attached itself as a name to this creature. Many of the Betsimisaraka still believe that the aye-aye is the embodiment of their fore- fathers, and hence will not touch it, much less do it any injury. It is said that, when one is discovered dead in the forest, these people make a tomb for it and bury it with all the formality of a funeral. The superstition extends even to the nest which the animal makes for itself If a man receives from another, or picks up accidentally, the portion on which the head of the aye-aye has rested, it is sure to bring good fortune ; while the receiving of that part on which its feet rested is followed by bad luck or death. This has passed into a proverb among the Betsimisaraka.’ In connection with this local ancestral theory, it is a strange coincidence that naturalists are all agreed in looking upon the aye-aye as the very last animal that can be classified as man-like. It is the last of the lemuroids, which some with good reason group in one order with the anthropoids under the designa- tion of Primates. 54 MAMMALS CHIROPTERA.—In the zoological series the next order is that of the bats, or Chzroptera, the hand-winged mammals, the only mammals that have the power of true flight. The hands and arms are large in proportion to the rest of the frame, and very light in structure, the bones being remarkably hollow and long and slender. Were those of a man to be in the same proportion, his fathom—that is, the distance he can stretch from finger-tip to finger-tip—would measure thirty feet instead of six. The wing is an expansion of the skin, stretching generally from the shoulder along the arms and fingers, and so down to the hind legs or the tail. The thumb is always free, and carries the claw by which the bat climbs ; the toes are always free, and are all clawed. The most peculiar thing in the skeleton is the knee-joint, which is turned backwards like the. elbow, so that a bat cannot walk readily, and rarely settles on the ground. Another point worth notice is the weakness of the hip-girdle compared with that of the shoulders, whose strength bears eloquent witness to the immense power necessary for sustained flight. No mammal has so highly developed a skin as a bat ; it is so richly pro- vided with nerve filaments that the sense of touch must be many times greater than that of any other vertebrate. As a matter of fact, a bat deprived of sight and smell and hearing has been found capable of flying easily about a room without knock- ing against a maze of silken threads, which had been stretched across it so as to leave spaces only just large enough for his open wings to pass. This power of discovering the proximity of objects without sce- SKELETON OF BAT 66 MAMMALS ing them, hearing them, or touching them, as we understand the meaning of touch, seems to be chiefly concentrated in the wing membranes, in the ears, and in the so-called ‘leaf’ that looks like a mask on the face, and serves the same purpose as a cat’s whiskers. Bats are not blind; on the contrary, their eyes are remarkably bright and intelligent. The naturalist, rather curiously, divides his bats into large ones and small ones, the large ones being all fruit-eaters and all natives of the eastern hemi- sphere. These can be readily distinguished from the others owing to their having always three joints in the second finger, and generally a claw on that finger as well as the claw on the thumb. The other bats never have the extra claw, and have either one or two joints in the finger. Another distinction is that the molar teeth of the fruit-bats have smooth crowns, with a longitudinal groove, while the molars of the others have cusped crowns and cross grooves. It is also stated that, when a fruit-bat goes to sleep, he hangs himself up by one leg, while all the other bats hang themselves up by two; but as there are four hundred and fifty species of bats altogether, it is probable that this is a rule not without exceptions. Fruit-bats, or fox-bats, as they are sometimes called, are found in enormous numbers in India, Australia, and the Polynesian Islands, some of the species feeding quite as much on flowers as on fruit. Many of them migrate, as birds do, and return to the same spots year after year, as their food becomes fit for them. All these bats, which are also known as flying foxes, have no tails, and belong to the genus THE COLLARED FRUIT-BAT AND YOUNG 58 MAMMALS Pteropus. The fox-bats, with short tails and short fur on the back of the neck, are assigned to another genus, Xantharpyza. In the accompanying illustra- tion we have a representative of YY. collaris, the collared fox-bat, which is interesting as showing the way in which such animals carry their young. There are collared bats living in the great pyramid of Cheops, others in the old buildings of Palestine, and one species has its home in the rocksalt caves of Kishm Island in the Persian Gulf. The general colouration of the fruit-bats is black and tan. Some of them are anything but prepos- sessing in appearance. For instance, there is a ‘hammer-headed’ bat in the Gaboon country which has a head like an ugly old horse, and there is a genus of ‘tube-nosed bats’ in the neighbourhood of Torres Straits the species of which look like Japanese monsters made up for show purposes. On the other hand, some are really handsome. In the Solomon Totunds there is one, a long-tongued fruit-bat, Veso- nycterts Woodford:, which has a bright orange body and dark brown wings. Another interesting bat in the Solomon Islands is the cusped-toothed one, in which the teeth have cusps that almost obliterate the longi- tudinal grooves, thus giving the transition form between the two sub-orders which zoologists have set up. The insectivorous bats are much more numerous than the others, there being no less than five families of them. Among those most worthy of notice are the horse-shoes with nose-leaves and no inner ear or tragus, as it is called, but a membrane in front, which BATS 59 is known as the anti-tragus. Two of these bats—the large one, Rhinolophus ferrum-equinum, and the lesser one, R. hipposiderus—are found in Britain. Another family, the Mycteride, have large ears, a large tragus, and a small nose leaf; to this family belongs the false vampire of India, Megaderma lyra, and the Queens- land form, MZ. gigas, which it is as difficult to look upon as a ‘small’ bat as it is to consider Carponycteris minimus asa ‘large’ one. The genus Wycteris, which gives its name to the family, is mainly an African one. The next family, Vesper- tiliontde, includes all the British species except the two horse-shoes. They all have a tragus, but no nose- leaf, and they all have a longish tail, to the tip of which the membrane stretches. The long-ear, Plecotus aurttus, may be taken as the representative of its genus. It may be recognised by its long ears and the grooves on the muzzle behind the nostrils. The ears are as mobile as those of a dog, and are not only moved backwards and forwards, but thrown into graceful folds during the act of listening, these folds being formed by three slight gristly rays that run from the base of the ear to the edge. This bat, which has a wing-spread of about ten inches, is found as far west as Ireland and as far east as the Himalaya, and all through Europe and North Africa, Like the other British species, it HEAD OF LONG-EARED BAT LONG-EARED BATS THE LONG-EARED BAT 61 hibernates—that is to say, enters into a state of torpor through the winter, when there are no insects to eat, suspending its respiration and digestion, and slowing LONG-EARED BAT SLEEPING its pulsation until its heart beats but once a second instead of at the normal furious rate. The long-ear does not come out until very late in the evening ; the barbastelle, Syzotus barbastellus,is a much earlier riser. This is a blacker bat than the other, 62 MAMMALS though white and piebald specimens are on record, and it has its muzzle apparently cut off short, with a groove on each side leading up to the nostrils. It is somewhat clumsy looking, and in its flight seems to take matters much more easily than that commonest of British bats, the pipistrelle, Vesperugo pzpistrellus, BARBASTELLE BAT WALKING which is out every evening from March to December, swift and busy, with long curving swoops and rapid twists and turns, as if it had not a minute to lose. A larger bat, and a more powerful one, is the noctule, belonging to the same genus ; he is the great beetle- catcher, ‘essentially adapted,’ says Bell, ‘for the cap- VAMPIRE BAT 63 ture and mastication of coleopterous insects, and he flies high and straight, with a’dash at every luckless cockchafer that may come sailing near him. Another important family of bats is the Em- ballonuride, of which there is only one European spe- cies) Among the more remarkable members of this group are the white bats, belonging to the genus Dz- HEAD OF VAMPIRE BAT clidurus, found in Central and South America; the naked bat of Malaysia, which has a pouch for holding the young while they are suckling ; the New Zealand bat, which not only catches insects as it flies, but as it creeps among the trees; and the vampires of South America, of which the only blood-suckers are Desmo- dus rufus and Diphylla ecaudata, In the Kensington 64 MAMMALS Natural History Museum there is a specimen of Des- modus, which Darwin saw caught in the act of sucking blood from a horse. Regarding its capture he says: «The vampire bat is often the cause of much trouble by biting the horses on their withers. The injury is generally not so much owing to the loss of blood as to the inflammation which the pressure of the saddle afterwards produces. The whole circumstance has lately been doubted in England; I was, therefore, fortunate in being present when one was actually caught on a horse’s back. We were bivouacking late one evening near Coquimbo, in Chili, when my ser- vant, noticing that one of the horses was very restive, went to see what was the matter, and fancying he could distinguish something, suddenly put his hand on the beast’s withers, and secured the vampire. In the morning the spot where the bite had been inflicted was easily distinguished from being slightly swollen and bloody.’ INSECTIVORA.—The bats are a special order of greatly modified insectivores, one of the transition stages being, perhaps, suggested in the Malaysian cobegos, who have not the power of true flight, but, like the flying squirrels and flying lizards, have an extension of membrane, which enables them to take exceedingly long leaps from tree to tree. Their genus is Galeopithecus, and there are two species. The insectivores are a very miscellaneous order. Though similar in structure, they differ very much in their food. Instead of living entirely on insects, as one would suppose from their name, some of them eat WATER SHREWS 66 MAMMALS leaves as well; some of them, like the mole, eat worms ; one of them, the potamogale, feeds on fish, and, unlike the rest of the order, has no collar-bones. Most of them have soft fur; but one genus, that containing the hedge-hogs, has a spiny coat, and another (Cenéetes), which includes the Madagascar ground-hog, is more or less spiny. There are some two hundred species altogether, the most numerous being the various kinds of shrews. Among these are the tree-shrews ( 7upazide@), that are like squirrels, both in habit and appearance ; the jumping shrews (Macro- scelide), long-nosed and long-legged, which hop about like tiny kangaroos ; the true shrews (Sordcide), which are often mistaken for mice, but differ markedly from them in their sickle-shaped incisor teeth. There are many kinds of shrews —earless shrews, water shrews, musk shrews, burrowing shrews, swimming shrews, web-footed shrews, and mole shrews, which last, however, belong to a different family, the Zalpidz, which includes the desmans and the moles. The mole extends from England to Japan, and fossil moles have been found in the rocks all the way down to the Lower Miocene. The mole has rudimentary eyes, but no external ears; its fur is like velvet, set vertically on the skin, so that it can pass backwards or forwards along its burrow with equal ease. Its shoulder-girdle is even more powerful than that of the bats, and the humerus bears a number of ridges for the attachment of the muscles that make it easily distinguishable from that of any other mammal. It has been said that the mole is as happy as a skylark, Assuredly his frame is as marvellously adapted for CARNIVORA 67 the conditions of his existence and the work he has to do. CARNIVORA.—The order of carnivores is another old group which must not have its name taken too literally. It does not include all the flesh- eaters ; and some of its members, notably among the bears, are practically vegetarians. Speaking gene- rally, however, the name is appropriate, for most of the species prey on other animals and live on warm flesh. In structure there is a great resemblance among them all. Their lower jaw can only move vertically, owing to the projecting process or condyle being semi-cylindrical, and working in a deep narrow, glenoid ‘ fossa’—or hollow—of corresponding form. Like the potamogale, but unlike the rest of the insectivores, their collar-bones are either absent or represented by little splints embedded in the muscles. Unlike, too, the majority of the insecti- vores, the bones of the forearm are distinct, and the fibula in the lower leg slender, though it is always separated from the tibia. The wrist-bones, too, are peculiar in having the lunar and scaphoid all in one, and no central bone; and with regard to this, it may be as well to explain that in the typical wrist there are eight bones—(1) the scaphoid, so called from its boat-shaped socket ; (2) the lunar, so called from its crescent shape, both of these being in con- nection with the radius ; (3) the cuneiform, or wedge- shaped bone, connected by a ligament with the ulna; and (4) the pisiform, or pea-shaped bone, developed in the tendon and gliding over in front of the cunei- E2 68 MAMMALS form; next to the fingers come (5) the trapezium, (6) the trapezoid, (7) the magnum, and (8) the unciform, or hook-shaped bone, the ninth, or central bone, to which we have more than once alluded, coming between the first and second rows. The carnivores are divided into three groups— fissipeds, pinnipeds, and creodonts—the first being mostly land animals, of about 300 species ; the second water animals, of about 50 species ; and the third being as yet only found fossil. The fissipeds are at once distinguishable from the others by their having flesh-teeth, or carnassials—that is to say, a back tooth on each side of both jaws specially modi- fied to suit their carnivorous diet. There are three groups of these land carnivores, which we may call the cats, the dogs, and the bears, or, to use the tech- nical and less misleading terms, the 4/urozdea, the Cynoidea, and the Arctotdea. To the first of these belong all the Fedde, large and small, lions, tigers, leopards, pumas, lynxes, and what not; the Vzver- vide, or civets, and mongooses ; the Proteleida, with one representative, the aard-wolf; and the Hyenide. The Cynoidea are really the dog family (Canzde), including the wolves and foxes. The Arctotdea include the Uvrstde, or bears; the Procyonide@, or raccoons; and the Mustelide, or otters, badgers and weasels. None of the carnivores have less than four toes on each foot. The dogs have five toes in front and four behind; but on the fore feet the thumb is so short as not to reach the ground, and on the hind foot there is occasionally a ‘dew-claw,’ which is SKELETON OF A LION 70 MAMMALS merely the rudimentary great toe. The bears have five toes on each foot. The cats have their toes padded and clawed, the claws being what is known as ‘retractile’—that is, held back by an elastic liga- ment in such a way as to be kept off the ground in the act of walking, or at will, and at the same time being instantly protrusible by stretching the fingers, or toes, as the case may be. None of the dogs have retractile claws, nor are any of their claws very sharp. When an animal walks on its toes it is said to be ‘digitigrade,; when on its sole it is ‘ planti- grade.’ The cats and dogs are usually classed as digitigrade, the bears as plantigrade and sub-planti- grade; but it is as well not to insist on this too closely. The typical cat has thirty teeth, the formula being 3, I, 3, 1 for the top jaw, and 3,1,2,1 for the other ; the typical dog, like the typical bear, has forty-two teeth, the dental formula being 3, I, 4, 2 for the top jaw, and 3, 1, 4,3 for the other. But some cats have only twenty-eight teeth, and one of the dogs (Lalande’s) has forty-eight, being no less than four molars in each half-jaw, a dentition which no other mammal has that is not a marsupial. In any notice of the Fede it is customary to begin with the lion. He certainly looks more like a ‘king of the beasts’ than the tiger, and, as a rule, holds himself more royally. His mane has a good deal to do with this, perhaps, but in the wild state he does not grow to the same extent as when he is in captivity, and altogether he is much more wiry in build than artists have figured him. He is now only found in Asia and Africa, slowly decreasing in num- LIONS V2 MAMMALS bers under the persistent attacks of the hunter and the gradual spread of cultivation. Forty years ago lions were so numerous: in the Delhi district that one sportsman, Colonel Acland Smith, killed fifty of them ; nowadays they are becoming so rare that in Kattywar they are being preserved as if they were partridges. Between the Tigris and the Euphrates they are still fairly plentiful, and they used to range into Palestine and Asia Minor, and even, according to Herodotus, into Thrace and Macedonia, while a species, Felzs spele@a, so closely allied to / deo as to be almost indistinguishable from it, roamed in Pre- Glacial days all over Western Europe, and even into what is now Britain. Lions are to be met with all over Africa, but few are now killed south of the Orange River. In Mashonaland they still abound. Lord Randolph Churchill on one occasion saw seven of them at once, ‘trooping and trotting along ahead of us like a lot of enormous dogs—great yellow objects, offering such a sight as I had never dreamed of. In Damaraland Galton ‘at one place put up eight lions; they were not close together, but within a space about two hundred yards across, through which we happened to - drive. It was the largest pack I had seen. Fourteen is the largest I have ever heard of.’ Lions are not nearly so dangerous to man as is gene- rally supposed. The last-mentioned explorer remarks that, at a rendezvous with the natives, he was curious to know what animals were most fatal to man in that country. ‘We counted over all the deaths that we could think of. Buffaloes (though not common here) AN ADVENTURE WITH LIONS ; 73 killed the most, then rhinoceroses, and, lastly, lions. Areep, the predecessor of Cornelius as chief of his tribe, was killed by a black rhinoceros. It is curious how many people are wounded by lions, though not killed. A very active Damara, who was some time with me in Damaraland, but who stayed behind as I journeyed up country, was in a dreadfully mangled state when I returned. He had found a lion in the act of striking down his ox, and rushed at him with his assegai ; he gave him a wound that must have proved mortal, for the assegai went far into his side, but the lion turned upon him, and seizing him, bit one elbow-joint quite through, and continued worry- ing him until some other Damaras ran up and killed the animal. My servant, Hans, had a very narrow escape some time since. He was riding old Friesch- land (the most useful ox I had, but now worn out by the Ondonga journey) along the Swakop, when he saw something dusky by the side of a camelthorn tree, two hundred yards off. This was a lion, that rose and walked towards him. Hans had his gun in his gun-bag by the side of his saddle, and rode on, for there is no use in provoking hostilities single- handed with a lion, unless some object has to be gained by it. As every sportsman at last acknow- ledges, the coolest hand and the best shot are never safe, for a bullet, however well aimed, is not certain to put the animal hors de combat. After the lion had walked some twenty or thirty-yards, Frieschland, the ox, either saw or smelt him, and became furious. Hans had enough to do to keep his seat, for a power- ful long-horned ox tossing his head about and plung- 74 MAMMALS ing wildly is a most awkward back for the best of jockeys. The lion galloped up. He and Hans were side by side. The lion made his spring, and one heavy paw came on the nape of the ox’s neck, and rolled him over ; the other clutched at Hans’s arm, and tore the sleeve of his shirt to ribbons, but did not wound him, and there they all three lay. Hans, though he was thrown upon his gun, contrived to wriggle it out, the lion snarling and clutching at him all the time; but for all that, he put both bullets into the beast’s body, who dropped, then turned round, and limped bleeding away into. the recesses of a broad, thick cover ; and, of course, Hans, shaken as he was, let him go. There were no dogs to follow him, so he was allowed to die in peace, and subsequently his spoor was taken up, and his remains found.’ Lions loom large when seen by the excited ex- plorer in the dusk of the evening, but they dwindle considerably when alongside the measuring tape. Mr. Selous gives ten feet as the length of his largest African lion, and from this we must deduct nearly a yard for the tail. Indian specimens recently measured are rather smaller, so that we shall not be far wrong in taking the lion as under four feet in height and about six feet in length, exclusive of his tail—that wonderful tail which has at its tip the tuft that surrounds the horny nail, known in fact and fiction as the thorn with which the king of beasts goads himself to anger. The lioness is about a foot shorter than the male over all—at the longest nine feet—and stands propor- tionally lower. She has no mane, and when very LIONESS AND CUBS 76 MAMMALS young is marked with stripes and spots, just as the males are, but more conspicuously. From their general sandy colour it is obvious that lions are not dwellers in forest districts, but in open sandy plains. As a rule, they sleep during the day and prowl at night, when their deep bass roar dominates every other sound. A lion, however, has three roars—one a sort of challenge; another, in quite a different key, betraying his regret at being baulked of his prey ; and a third a menagerie roar, which is by no means alarming. Sir Samuel Baker’s description of the challeng- ing roar is perhaps the best: ‘There is nothing so beautiful or enjoyable to my ears as the roar of a lion on a still night, when everything is calm, and no sound disturbs the solitude except the awe-inspiring notes, like the rumble of distant thunder, as they die away into the deepest bass. The first few notes resemble the bellow of a bull ; these are repeated in slow succession four or five times, after which the voice is sunk into a lower key, and a number of quick, short roars are at length followed by rapid coughing notes, so deep and power- ful that they seem to vibrate through the earth.’ The tiger (F. ¢igris) differs from the lion in the absence of the mane and in the general colouration. Tigers are boldly striped, as a rule, but white tigers, and even black tigers, are on record; and the Chinese tiger, instead of having a short velvety coat, is almost as furry asa bear. The tiger is a splendid cat, quite as long as the lion, though not so high on the legs ; and he is the only cat with black cross stripes on his ‘THE TIGER 77 body, a pattern which makes him almost invisible among the reeds of the jungle and in the shadows of the forest. The ground colour of this coat varies con- siderably ; it is brightest when young. Among the males it begins to fade as soon as the ruff grows thick round the throat—the ruff which represents the lion’s mane. It is yellowest in the Indian jungles ; it is reddest in the forests of the north. For the tiger still lives north of Lake Baikal, and in Amurland and Saghalien ; westward, his present limit seems to be the Caucasus; eastward, he is at home in Sumatra, Java, and Bali, though he does not appear to reach Borneo, nor does he cross Palk Strait from India into Ceylon. Fossil tigers have been found in the New Siberian Islands in the Arctic Sea; in fact, the tiger never was an animal peculiar to the tropics, and there are good reasons for supposing that it is only within a comparatively late period that his range has extended as far south as India, where he keeps himself per- sistently in the shade, and wallows constantly in the mud during the burning heat of the dry season. Like the lion, he is gradually being driven out by the sportsman and the cultivator, and in many places his haunts are confined to the islands in the rivers. He is never as bold in look as the lion so often is, but goes slouching and slinking along like a true cat; and even in attack he seldom takes his hind legs off the ground, but rushes instead of springing at his prey. He makes for the nape of the victim’s neck, and his ‘kill’ can always be recognised by his 78 MAMMALS beginning to feed on it at its hind quarters, while the leopard begins at the shoulders. The leopard (/. pardus) is recognisable at once by his spots. He comes next in size to the lion and tiger, and, unlike them, he can climb a tree. He is found all over Africa, and in Asia ranges from Pales- LEOPARDS tine to Manchuria, and southwards of that line into India and. Malaysia. Like the tiger, his coat is more woolly in the colder climates, and its colour varies according to his haunts. Occasionally he is almost black ; but just as the ordinary black cat shows the tabby stripes when seen in a good light, so does the THE JAGUAR 79 black leopard his rings and rosettes. At one time some of his varieties were called panthers, but there are no panthers nowadays. Structurally there was no differ- ence between the varieties, and the discovery of the complete series of intermediate coat patterns proved that panther and leopard were identical. The ounce, or snow-leopard (F. uucza), is a Central Asian species, ranging north and south of the Altai Mountains, and rarely below the snow-line. It is a whitish animal with black rings about the size of a crown piece, the fur being very long and not unlike that of a Persian cat. The leopard has been measured to reach eight feet in length; the snow-leopard has not been known to exceed seven feet six inches. Like the puma, it is said never to attack man except in self-defence. The leopards have their spots arranged apparently at random. The jaguar (F. onca) has his in fairly well-marked rows, and they are larger. As there are black leopards, so there are black jaguars, and the ground colour of his coat also varies from yellow to nearly a tan. The jaguar is an American animal, ranging from Texas to Patagonia, and is so good a climber ‘that in some districts he becomes almost entirely arboreal, and feeds on the monkeys and other in- habitants of the trees. In other parts the jaguar becomes almost a fishing-cat, and has been watched standing in the shallow bend of a river, knocking out the fish with the lightning stroke of his powerful paw. In other places he devotes his attention to turtle, tearing the upper shell from the lower at a 80 MAMMALS. single pull, and making but a mouthful or two of the contents. He is a big handsome fellow, over six feet long, tail and all, and is as often killed with the lasso or bolas as with dogs and poisoned arrows. He is notoriously noisy, roaring much by night, and espe- cially before bad weather. A significant habit on the part of the jaguar is noticed by Darwin: ‘One day, when hunting on the banks of the Uruguay, I was shown certain trees to which these animals constantly recur for the purpose, as it is said, of sharpening their claws. I saw three well-known trees; in front the bark was worn smooth, as if by the breast of the animal, and on each side there were deep scratches, or rather grooves, extending in an oblique line, nearly a yard in length. The scars were of different ages. A common method of ascertaining whether a jaguar is in the neighbourhood is to examine these trees. I imagine this habit of the jaguar is exactly similar to one which may any day be seen in the common cat, as, with outstretched legs and exserted claws, it scrapes the leg of a chair; and I have heard of young fruit-trees in an orchard in England having been thus much injured. Some such habit must also be common to the puma, for on the bare, hard soil of Patagonia I have frequently seen scores so deep that no other animal could have made them. The object of this practice is, I believe, to tear off the ragged points of their claws, and not, as the gauchos think, to sharpen them.’ The jaguar is the tiger of the New World ; the puma is the lion. The puma (/. concolor) ranges 82 MAMMALS from New England and British Columbia in the north to Tierra del Fuego in the south. As his specific name implies, he is all of one colour, a tawny | brown, which is, however, much lighter in shade below. In the young, however, there are distinct spots, evidently a case of atavism, as with the young of the lion. Pumas over eight feet long from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail have been reported, as also have entirely white specimens ; but these are exceptional ; the average length is about seven fect. The puma is amzgo del cristeano, which we may translate, not too literally, as the ‘white man’s friend.’ He rarely attacks man unless forced to do so. As Mr. Lydekker observes in Zhe Royal Natural History, ‘It is notorious that, in places where pumas abound, it is perfectly safe for a child to wander alone, and even sleep, on the pampas.’ But this respect and good-fellowship extend to man alone. ‘Very different is the behaviour of the puma when attacked by a hunter accompanied by dogs. At such times the animal is roused to the fiercest paroxysms of rage ; and with hair erect and eyes flashing like balls of lurid fire, it rushes, spitting and snarling, on the dogs, utterly regardless of the presence of the hunter, So thoroughly, indeed, is the hunter ignored on such occasions, that he may actually belabour the puma on the head with a cudgel without drawing its attack upon himself, the animal receiving such blows with- out retaliation, and calmly waiting its opportunity of making a rush upon the dogs.’ And he is quite as hostile to a far more formidable foe, the jaguar. ‘It is well known, says Mr. W. H. Hudson, ‘that, where THE PUMA 83 the two species inhabit the same district, they are at enmity, the puma being the persistent persecutor of the jaguar, following it and harassing it as a tyrant- bird harasses an eagle or hawk, moving about it with such rapidity as to confuse it, and when an oppor- tunity occurs, springing upon its back, and inflicting terrible wounds with teeth and claws.’ In the north the puma is bold enough to attack the grizzly bear. The puma’s ‘kill’ can generally be recognised by its having its neck broken, the.animal springing on the shoulders, and then drawing back the head with one of its paws until the vertebre break. He is not the only American cat without spots or stripes on his mature coat. In the central dis- tricts of the continent there are the brownish-grey jaguarondi, and the weasel-like eyra, which is almost chestnut in colour. In the Eastern Hemisphere there are also two uniformly-coloured small cats, these being the flat-headed cat of Malaysia and the Bornean bay cat. And just as Asia has its black- spotted snow-leopard, so has South America its white-and-black, but much smaller, colocollo. The most southerly cat is the pampas-cat, which is prac- tically confined to Patagonia, and may be considered as the representative of the manul, which lives in the deserts of Central Asia. The chief African small cat is the serval, which may, however, occa- sionally attain a length of nearly five feet over all. Like other cats, it has a tendency to ‘melanism,’ there being a black variety in the Kilima-njaro district. Melanism, of course, means the change to blackness, just as albinism means the change to F 2 84 MAMMALS whiteness. The ‘melanotic domestic cat’ is the common or garden black cat of our everyday ac- quaintance. Another noteworthy cat is the fishing-cat of South-Eastern Asia and Formosa, and another is the Indian jungle-cat, with its hair-tipped ears, which differs but slightly from the caracal that, in . its turn, leads on to the lynxes, which are found all round the Northern Hemisphere. Two other cats of importance are the Egyptian cat (/. caffra), from which the domestic cats of Europe are probably descended, and the Indian desert-cat (/ ornata), from which the domestic cats of Asia came, the Persian breed being by some naturalists considered to trace its pedigree back to the manul. But we have had cats enough. Two we must mention—the Malaysian clouded leopard, or ‘tiger of the trees,’ which lives on the birds and small mammals it can catch among the branches, and the long-legged, small-headed Indian hunting leopard, which differs so much from the rest in its appearance, in its teeth, and in its claws, that it is now no longer classed as a Felzs, but has a genus to itself, being known as Cynelurus gubatus. Among the fossils of the Miocene we find the intermediate forms by which the gap is bridged be- tween the Melde and the Viverride. The civets are an interesting but somewhat odoriferous group, confined, with two exceptions, to Africa and Southern Asia. The most remarkable of them is, perhaps, the peculiarly savage fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox), the largest carnivore of Madagascar, which is plantigrade in its hind feet and digitigrade in its front feet, which HYAINAS 85 alone are padded. He has thirty-six teeth ; the true civets have forty. There is only one true civet (Vzverra ctvetta) in Africa; all the others are Asiatic. In Miocene times there were civets in Europe, and even in England. The genets are nearly all African, though one of them (Genetta vulgaris) ranges into the south of France, having, like the magot, pro- bably crossed at Gibraltar before the straits existed. The linsangs are all Asiatic but one, and he is found on the West Coast of Africa; the palm-civets are also Asiatic, with a single representative on the West Coast of Africa. The binturong, or bear-cat, has a genus to himself (Avctzetzs) ; he lives in the trees, as do the palm-civets. Another of the family having a genus to himself is the Cywogale of Malaysia, who is happy in his varied fare, for not only does he climb trees and eat fruit, but he hunts on land for mam- malian flesh, and swims and dives in the water in search of fishes and crabs. To the last group of the Viverride belong the weasel-like mongooses of which we have heard so much with regard to their vermin-catching and snake-destroying powers. One of these (Herpestes urva) devotes himself mainly to the pursuit of frogs and crabs. Another (HZ. zchneu- mon) has an insatiable appetite for crocodile eggs. The sole representative of the Proteleide is the African Aard-wolf, who is not unlike a hyzena, with a pointed muzzle and long ears, and five toes instead of four on his front paws. He feeds mainly on white ants and carrion, and lives in a burrow of his own making. The hyenas are the most dog-like of the cats, and 86 MAMMALS though generally given a bad name, are by no means untamable, and have even been used as watchdogs. Like dogs, their claws are not retractile. They have the strongest jaws of all the carnivores, their conical premolars being so buttressed up with fore-and-aft tubercles that, aided by the flesh-teeth and tusks, a hyzena, as Mr. Lydekker says, ‘is able to crunch in its jaws the shin-bone of an ox almost as readily as a dog can break that of a fowl.’ There are quite a number of species of hyzena, but three only are now known as living. Of these, the striped one (7. striata) is both Asiatic and African; but the brown one (ZH. brunnea) and the spotted or laughing one (4. crocuta) are exclusively African. The striped hyzena seems to have ranged over all the Old World, and is an animal of respectable antiquity, for its teeth have been found fossil even in England. In Syria and Palestine its favourite haunts are the rock-cut tombs, but it does not confine its attention to dead meat, for a donkey belonging to one of Canon Tristram’s servants was killed by a hyena, and it often carries off dogs and sheep and goats. Like all hyzenas, it is very high and heavy on the fore legs, and the prints made by the hind feet are very light and small. Colonel Sykes brought one of these hyenas home from India with him, and placed it in the Zoological Gardens. It had been as faithful and playful as many a dog. When the colonel paid any of his occasional visits to the Gardens, it always recognised him instantly among the crowd. One day when he came, the hyzna was asleep and he called it by name. The animal jumped ANECDOTE OF A HYANA 87 up and rushed at the bars of the cage to rub its head there, and then bounded about, yelping its joy. When the colonel went away it invariably stood and looked after him mournfully until he was out of sight. The brown hyzena has a much more woolly coat than the others. He is found in both East and West Africa, on the rocky districts near the coast, and in the east he has been seen on Kilima-njaro. The spotted hyzena is the largest of the existing species ; his legs are more equal in length than those of the others, and he is also distinguished from them by his teeth. In early days he ranged all over Europe, and his remains have even been found in Yorkshire and the Mendips. He hunts in packs and is a singularly daring and vigorous animal. According to Mr. H. H. Johnston, he will not only carry off sheep and calves, but even children. Mr. Johnston gives an instance of one attempting to possess himself of a sick man. Mr. Galton relates how one tried to run off with an old woman, in one of the best hyzna stories yet published :—‘ This man’s nose,’ he says, ‘was seized by a hyena while he was asleep on his back—very unpleasant, and an excellent story to frighten children with. I could hardly believe it, until a case occurred quite a propos. An old Bushwoman, who encamped under the lee of a few sticks and reeds that she had bent together, after the custom of those people, was sleeping coiled up close round the fire, with her lank feet straggling out in the dark, when a hyena, who was prowling about in the early morning, laid hold of her heel and pulled her bodily half out of the hut. Her howls alarmed the hyzna, who quitted his 88 MAMMALS hold ; and she hobbled up next morning to us for plaisters and bandages. The very next night the old lady slept in the same fashion as before, and the hyena came in the same way and tugged at her heel, just as he had done the previous evening. The poor creature was in a sad state, and one of Mr. Hahn’s men sat up the next night to watch for the animal. I squatted in the shade of her house, my companion covered a side-path, and the woman occupied her hut as a bait. It was a grand idea, that of baiting with an old woman. The hyena came along the side-path, and there received his quietus.’ The dogs (Canide@) are found in all the five con- tinents. Their dental formula we have given, but it is important to notice that their upper flesh-tooth, which is the fourth premolar, has a stout bilobed blade, while the lower flesh-tooth, or first molar, has a compressed bilobed blade A dog is longer than a cat in the muzzle, and shorter in the tail ; his skull is longer, with the orbits very wide behind; and his shoulder-girdle is different, the clavicles being small. Dogs, as a rule, hunt in packs, and run their prey down, while cats hunt singly, and take their prey by surprise. Dogs are an oldish family in the world, but we have only to go deep enough into the rocks to find that they and the civets had a common ancestor. Domesticated dogs appear to be in all cases merely tame varieties of the local wild dogs, modified according to man’s fancy by careful cross-breeding. Among the wild representatives of the genus the JACKALS 89 largest are the wolves, of which but one species— that peculiar to the Falkland Islands—is known south of the equator. The typical wolf (C. lupus) is yellowish grey, but there are red wolves, and black wolves, and white wolves, and, in Tibet, a shaggy black-and-white variety. The coyote (C. _latrans) is much smaller than the common wolf, and his coat varies with the season from reddish brown to whitish grey. He is a North American, heard of in late years as far south as Costa Rica, driven south, so the theory goes, by constant persecution. Between his present southerly limit and his Falkland cousin (C. antarcticus) there is the whole length of South America. Another wolf, with a species to himself, is the Abyssinian one (C. szmensis), but he is half a jackal. The jackals are smaller than the wolves. They have a wide distribution in the Old World, being found in South Eastern Europe, in Southern Asia, and, at odd intervals, all the way down East Africa from Egypt to the Cape, and even in the Gaboon country on the other coast. No jackal is particular in his diet, but, besides acting as scavenger, he enjoys fresh meat occasionally, and will bring down young or weakly goats and sheep when he has a chance; he is as fond of poultry as a fox, and varies his meals with maize, sugar-cane, and fruits. That he is not as truly carnivorous as the wolf might be guessed from his flesh-teeth, which are much smaller in proportion to the molars adjoining them. Next to the wolves and jackals come the dogs, of which the chief wild species are the Australian go MAMMALS dingo, the Siberian dog, the Indian dog, the raccoon- dog of China, and the colpeo, and two or three other’ South American species, including the carasissi (C. cancrivorus), which, like the crab-eating macaque and the cynogale, is not above adding crustaceans to his SS ey bb ESKIMO DOGS bill of fare. The wildest of the domesticated varie- ties is that known as the Eskimo dog, which, with a slight difference in colour, is found on both sides of the Arctic Sea. On the American side his life has often been described ; on the Asiatic side he has a harder time of it when at work, but he has a summer ESKIMO DOG 9g! holiday, in which he is turned out to run wild and find his own living. ‘During this time, says Dr. Guillemard, ‘he wanders over the country at will, sometimes returning at night to his burrow, at others being absent for days together. A good hunter and fisherman, he supports himself upon the game and salmon he catches, and it is but rarely that he deserts his master for good. But the inhabitants have to pay a good price for his services. Owing to his rapacity, it is impossible to keep sheep, goats, or any of the smaller domestic animals, and Kamschatka is one of the few countries in the world where fowls are un- known,’ The Eskimo dog never forgets his skill as a hunter. One among many instances of this was afforded by a dog of this variety who belonged to a gentleman in Edinburgh. Whenever he was fed, he would carefully strew some of the meat about in a half-circle to entice fowls and rats, and he would then lay himself down and pretend to be asleep, ready to pounce upon and kill the first luckless creature that fell into the temptation. The domesti- cated dog comes of an intelligent family ; his cousins, the wolves and foxes, are anything but dull, and man has been doing his best for thousands of years to develop that natural intelligence on human lines. Man may not have entirely transformed the psycho- logy of the dog, as Dr. Romanes thought, but ‘the gigantic experiment upon the potency of individual experience, accumulated by heredity, has certainly produced the nearest approach to reason found amongst the carnivores. 92 MAMMALS The foxes are said to be distinguishable from the dogs by their bushier tails, their more pointed muzzles, and their oval-eyed pupils, which are set somewhat on A GROUP OF FENNECS the slant; but these differences want a good deal ot looking for when comparing a South American dog with a North American fox. The common fox FOXES 93 (C. vulpes), in its many varieties, is found practically all round the northern world, and always bears the same character of being an exceedingly smart indi- vidual, well able to take care of himself. The Arctic fox (C. lagopus) changes his coat in winter to a pure white. The corsac fox of the Asian deserts also changes his coat, but not to the same extent, his hairs becoming merely ringed with white. The largest of the short-eared foxes is the so-called grey- hound fox of North Britain. The smallest is C. canus, the hoary fox of Baluchistan. Differing but slightly from the true foxes are the fennecs, those quaint little creatures with big, wide ears and bushy tails, which, in two species, are found in North Africa, and in Persia and Afghanistan, the intermediate form being the South African asse fox (C. chama), which lives to a great extent on ostrich eggs, rolling them along from their nest to its burrow, and there breaking them against a stone. With the bears we enter on the third section of the fissiped carnivora. The bears themselves are’ so distinct in appearance that there is no difficulty in identifying them now, but in the past, during the existence of the dog-like bears and bear-like dogs, it would not have been so easy to draw the line. There are but three living genera, Ursus, Melursus and Ailuropus, the last having but one species, the black- and-white or parti-coloured bear of Tibet, which is not really a carnivore but a herbivore ; Melursus also having but one species, the Indian sloth-bear, which feeds upon fruits and flowers and ants and honey, and 94. MAMMALS is hunted by the southern hill-tribesmen with poles smeared with bird-lime. The bear which has been longest known to Euro- peans is Bruin, the brown bear (UV. arctos), found all over Northern Europe and Asia, as far south as the Himalayas and the Pyrenees, and in one of its varieties, Crowther’s bear, even in the Atlas range of Northern Africa. The brown bear ‘eats almost anything, and fattens himself up for the winter, when he makes himself comfortable in a cave or hollow tree and takes a long sleep until the weather becomes warmer, when he goes forth, looking miserably thin, to get himself into condition. It is during this period of hibernation that the young are born, two or three cubs at a time, blind for a month and nurslings for two months more. The biggest of the bears seems to be the Polar one (U. maritimus), who is the only white bear. He has a much longer head than the others and it is smaller in proportion to his bulk. He is the most carnivorous of the bears, and the most aggressive towards man ; awkward as he looks, he gets over ice at a great rate, and he swims magnificently. Some years ago the Polar bear at the Zoological Gardens escaped, and was discovered early one morning near the dromedary house by a blacksmith, who had come to his work. The blacksmith, says Mr. Broderip, looked at the white bear, and the white bear looked at the blacksmith, who, like a valiant and wise smith, did not run, but stood his ground and shouted, whereupon the bear retreated into a bush of laurel. Presently the bear put forth his nose, as if meditating THE POLAR BEAR 96 MAMMALS an advance, when the smith shouted again, and the bear again drew back. This continued till the shouts of the man collected some of the keepers, who instantly took measures for his recapture. One of them advanced with a strong rope which had a running noose, and threw it over the monster’s neck, and then he pulled and the bear pulled till the rope broke. The bear quietly lifted his arm and with his forepaw disembarrassed himself of the noose. The keeper, nothing daunted, caught him with another rope, ‘and a struggle ensued, the infuriated beast biting the rope till he got free, and walking on, fol- lowed by a detachment of keepers, who managed, by heading him at proper intervals and showing a bold front, to keep him out of the park. While they were trying to prevent this, he made a desperate, © but luckily ineffectual, rush at one of the men. At last, by dint of marches and counter-marches, they so managed their tactics that they drove him gradually up to the door of a den which stood in- vitingly open, and in he went and was secured, not, however, without dashing with all his weight and strength at the gate of his new prison.’ The grizzly bear (U. horribzlis) is near akin to the brown bear, but he differs in some trifling respects, and he is larger. Nowadays his home is the Rocky Mountains, all the way down into Mexico. His main food is flesh, but -he will fatten on nuts and acorns, and along the Pacific slope he is fond of fish, and will wade into the water, knocking out the salmon right and left when they are running thick. Although he is fierce enough, he will in these days THE GRIZZLY BEAR 98 oe MAMMALS rarely attack man unprovoked, many of the rushes . we hear of being due to his attempt to bolt into safety by the shortest road, or rolling downhill when shot. Often when surprised he will run away from man. Mr. Baillie-Grohman gives an amusing instance of this in Camps in the Rockies. ‘1 was about to stoop,’ he says, ‘to gather in the prize’—a fly he had caught to fish with—‘when out of the bushes, as if growing from the earth, there rose a grizzly. Rearing up on his hind legs, as they in- variably do on being surprised, he stood, his head and half-opened jaws a foot and a half or two feet over my six foot of humanity, and hardly more than a yard between gigantic him and pigmy me. The reader will believe me when I say he looked the biggest grizzly I ever saw, or want to see so close. It would be difficult to say who was the more astonished of the two, but I know very well who was the most frightened. My heart seemed all of a sudden to be in two places ; for, had I not felt a big lump of it in my throat, I could have sworn it was leaking out at a big rent in the toes of my moccasins. Fortunately, the Old Uncle of the Rockies had more than probably never had anything to do with human beings, for I saw very plainly that he was more puzzled as to my identity than I was regarding his. His small, pig eyes were not very ferocious-looking, and first one then the other ear would move, expressing, as I interpreted it, more im- patience than ill-feeling. I do not exactly remember who first moved, but I do recollect that, on looking back over my shoulder, I saw the old gentleman ‘ as ; RS WS ‘Sa GRIZZLY BEAR IN A TRAP IOO MAMMALS actually running away from me.’ But at the same time, once he is attacked or begins an attack, the grizzly will fight to the last. In the south the grizzly does not hibernate ; in the north he does. Like the jaguar he cleans his claws on trees, but the marks he thus leaves give no clue as to his height, as they are generally made when he awakes in the spring, and there are two or three feet of snow on the ground for him to stand on. The American black bear (U. americanus) is rarely over five feet long. He used to range over all North America, but he is now found only in mountains and swamps. In the south, according to Mr. James Gordon, ‘the bear usually makes his bed in the most impenetrable cane brake. He cuts and piles up heaps of cane until he has a comfortable spring mattress. He is very fastidious in his taste, and will not remain long in a wet bed ; so after every spell of bad weather he changes his quarters. In diet he has a wide, almost omnivorous, taste. In the summer he is very destructive to the farmer’s corn- fields, showing a decided relish for green corn or roasting ears, or fat pig or mutton as a side-dish, not refusing a pumpkin by way of dessert. As the fall season approaches, he climbs after the wild grape, the succulent muscadine, the acorn and the persimmon, and leaves his sign everywhere he travels in heaps of hulls of pecan and scaly-bark hickory nuts. This is called the lapping season, as he ensconces him- self in a tree-lap and breaks the limbs to pieces in gathering nuts and fruits. He is also excessively fond of honey, and is utterly regardless of bee-stings BLACK BEAR 102 MAMMALS while tearing to pieces a nest of wild bees from a hollow tree. The American black bear is all black except his muzzle, which is tan incolour. The Himalayan black bear has a white chevron on his chest ; the Japanese bear is similarly, but less distinctly, marked ; the Malayan bear has the mark even fainter and less definite in shape. This last bear is found as far east as Borneo. In the Andes there is a bear (U. ornatus) with white rings round his eyes, from which he has obtained the name of the spectacled bear. The Procyonide comprise two genera—4lurus, whose only living representative is the small, bear- like panda found in Northern India, although an ex- tinct species has been unearthed from the Red Crag of Suffolk ; and Procyon, to which belong the Ameri- . can raccoons, cacomistles, and coatis, and the pre- hensile-tailed kinkajou. The MMustelide are very widely distributed. They have all but one pair of molars in the upper jaw, and are allied in one diréc- tion to the bears and in the other to thecivets. Like the insectivores, they are a somewhat miscellaneous family, and include such widely different looking animals as the martens, polecats and weasels, the mink, the wolverene, the skunks, the badgers, and the otters. The next great group is that of the marine car-. nivores, or Pzunzpedia, in which the upper parts of the limbs are included within the general contour of the body, and the digits, five in number, are webbed, the first and fifth toes of the hind foot being, as a rule, stouter and longer than the rest. There are Ss SSRN SS THE OTTER 104. MAMMALS three families—the O¢ardide, or eared seals; the Trichechide, or walruses; and the Phoczde, or earless seals, the last having their hind limbs stretched out behind, while the other two families have them so arranged as to be capable of being turned forward and used on land as ordinary feet and legs. The eared seals are the sea-lions and sea-bears, the fur-seals, the seals of the sealskin jackets, which, in the more restricted sense, are not seals at all but more or less of a remove from the otters, or, rather, divergent branches from a common ancestor, that have attained a somewhat similar fitness for some- what similar conditions. The walrus, or sea-horse (Scandinavian Valross— that is, ‘ whale-horse’), isan immense fellow, weighing, perhaps, two hundred stone. Really there are two walruses—one in the Pacific, one in the Atlantic— with well-marked differences. Both rank high among the monsters of the deep. Fifteen or twenty feet long, and even longer, armed with two huge canine teeth, sometimes measuring thirty inches from point to socket, with which to climb the ice-floes or drag the weeds and molluscs from the rocks—-teeth which furnish no small proportion of our commercial ivory —he is a gallant victim of civilisation, and fights for his life as boldly and determinedly as any animal hunted by man. At one time so numerous that they would completely clothe the surface of a floe and bring it down to the water’s edge, sprawling on it in their hundreds, each with his head and shoulders on his neighbour’s back, these sea-horses are now be- coming comparatively scarce, except in a few feebly- THE WALRUS 105 worked localities, and the Tromsoe and Hammerfest sloops, with their curiously large mainsails, square topsails, and three headsails, have to cruise farther and farther north to reach them. THE WALRUS Sea-horses are either shot or harpooned. If shot, they have to be approached with care, and brought down with a bullet planted just as far behind the eye as the eye is from the snout. Should this point 106 MAMMALS be missed, the consequences may prove serious to ~ the hunter. Harpooning the morse is, however, a commoner, though but slightly safer, mode of, securing him. There are few things more exciting than to watch the encounter between a walrus and an Eskimo. When a walrus reaches a floe he usually stops at the edge, until his companion behind butts him up on to the ice and takes his place. Hence the occupation of a floe by walrus is a very slow and clumsy manceuvre, particularly when the herd is a large one—a large one numbering, say, seven thousand. In a case like this, the walrus in some way has to be cut off from his companions. But often the morse are met with in detached families, and the peculiar song—half a cow’s moo, half a mastiff's bay—directs the Eskimo to his prey. The chase is a long one; once the sea-horse is sighted, the advance can be made only while he is under water. Each time he comes up to breathe, his pursuer stoops down to hide. At last the hunter gets near enough to strike him as he rises at the side of the floe. The phlegmatic harpooner then becomes excited. His coil of walrus-hide, a well-trimmed line of many fathoms’ length, lies at his feet. He ties one end to an iron barb, and this he fastens loosely by a socket to a shaft of horn; the other end is already loose. He grasps the harpoon ; the water eddies and whirls; puffing and panting, up comes the unwieldy sea-horse. The Eskimo rises slowly, his right arm thrown back, his left hanging close to his side. The walrus looks about him and throws the water off his crest ; the Eskimo launches HUNTING THE WALRUS 107 the fatal weapon, and it sinks deep into the animal’s side. Down goes the wounded awak, but the Eskimo is already speeding with winged feet from the scene of combat, letting his coil’ run out freely, but clutching the final loop with a desperate grip. As he runs, he seizes a small stick of bone roughly pointed with iron, and by a swift, strong movement thrusts it into the ice, twists the line around it, and prepares for a struggle. The wounded walrus plunges desperately, and churns the ice-pool into foam. Meanwhile the line is hauled tight’ at one moment and loosened the next, for the hunter has kept his station. But the ice crashes, and a couple of walrus rear up through it, not many yards from where he stands. One of them, a male, is excited, angry, partly alarmed ; the other, a female, looks calm, but bent on revenge. Down, after a rapid survey of the field, they go again into the ocean depths; and immediately the har- pooner has changed his position, carrying with him his coiland fixing it anew. Scarcely is the manceuvre accomplished before the pair have once more risen, breaking up an area of ten feet in diameter about the very spot he had left. They sink fora second time, and a second time he changes his place. And thus continues the battle until the exhausted beast receives a second wound, and is finally secured. What with bears on the land and sharks in the water, the struggle of the seals for existence is a keen one; but they more than held their own until man gave his attention to them. They are now a decreasing group. The smallest of the family is the 108 MAMMALS ringed seal, the largest the sea-elephant, which haunts the southern seas. Many are the interesting stories of the chase of the morunga. During the infancy of the family the males form a cordon round the mothers and their children, and keep them from entering the water until the cubs are of sufficient age to brave its perils. The male sea-elephant is a magnificent fellow, over thirty feet in length, and when the hunters come down upon a group he is always killed last, for the instant he falls his wives and children disperse, while as long as he lives they cluster round him, till not one remains unshot. From Kamtschatka comes the noisy sea-lion, so called from its curious mane ; and in the same neighbourhood we get the sea-leopard, and the sea-bear whose larger and better-developed limbs enable him to stand and walk on shore, and who maps the ocean beach into little kingdoms, one for each family, to cross the boundaries of which means a deadly fight between the petty kings. Sea- bears are by no means despicable enemies. A case is on record where a man was besieged by one on a rock for six hours. Like the sea-elephants, they are very careful of their cubs, and should a mother accidentally hurt the baby, she is loudly remonstrated with by her indignant spouse. But the most im- portant of the hair seals, in a commercial sense, are the harp seal and the common seal. To the Green- lander the seal is invaluable. Its flesh gives him food; its skin gives him his boats, his clothes, and this shoes; its bones give him his implements ; its entrails give him his window-panes ; its bristles give him his ornaments. The chase of the harp seal has THE SEA-BEAR 109 been frequently described. We all know how he travels in regiments under the command of some particular chief, and how the sentinels are thrown out to give warning of impending danger. We have all THE NORTHERN SEA-BEAR heard of the seal-sleep, of two minutes’ slumber and half-a-minute’s watch to keep secure from danger. Great is the skill shown by the Eskimo in his seal- chasing, either when, in his sealskin canoe, he slips down on his victim and, shifting the paddle to the TIO MAMMALS left, throws the harpoon with his right, and trusts to the bladder tied to the line automatically playing the seal to his doom ; or when, creeping seal-fashion over the ice, he gets between the phoca and his ice-hole ; or when, hiding behind his snow barricade, he watches his opportunity, should the interfering gull not give tongue and baulk him of his prey. | Besides the harp seal, there are the crested seal, the bearded seal, and the common seal, or sea-dog, which yields the skins so useful to the currier. A clever fisher is the common seal. He will hang about the fishing-grounds and take the fish out of the nets, and will even swim in and out the passages between the salmon seines in search of the food he likes best. On the seal meadows of Newfoundland, the fields of floating ice round which he lives, he is often met with in thousands, and all up the Labrador coast and off the Magdalen Islands the herds are immense. Fifty years ago, when once the ice was met, a man from the masthead, even with a telescope, could see nothing but seals, so thick was the pack, and the ships were always sure of a load. Now, through the reckless manner in which the fishing for some years was conducted, the catches are frequently very poor. But enough. A book might be written about the seals, and we have only a page or two to devote to them. They are as affectionate “as cats, and almost as intelligent as dogs; but we have no space in which to do them justice. The third sub-order of the carnivora need not detain us long. They are all fossil and of Eocene and Miocene age, and of such a generalised type RODENTIA III that they may not only be looked upon as ancestral to the land and water carnivores, but to the in- sectivores as well, besides filling the gap between the living carnivores and the marsupials. RODENTIA. — The rodents are the most numerous of the mammals. There are quite 1,000 species of them, and their representatives are in multitudes. They are easily recognised by the long curved chisel-shaped incisor teeth, and by the hairy pad which projects from the outside skin into the mouth behind the incisors in such a way as to keep the mouth clear of the dust and chips produced by gnawing. Rodents are conveniently divided into two sub-orders—those with only two incisors in the upper jaw, and those with four ; no rodent having more than two incisors in the lower jaw; and no rodent has canine teeth. To the first sub-order, the S7zmplicedentata, belong the squirrels, the mice, and the porcupines; to the other, the Duplicidentata, belong the hares, both tailed and tailless. Among the squirrel-like rodents are included the flying squirrels, the marmots, and the beaver. The flying squirrels of Europe, Asia, and North America have their parachute-like membranes extended from the wrist ; those of Africa have them starting only from the elbow. In another respect the Africans differ markedly from the rest, for they have a series of scales at the roots of their tails, with which they are said to cling to the bark of the trees they climb. These African squirrels belong to a distinct family, the Anomaluride ; the true squirrels, with no 112 MAMMALS scales to the tail, belong to the Sccurzde@. The spiny squirrels are exclusively African ; their hair is very coarse and quill-like, and their ears are very small or, at least as far as the external ear is concerned, wanting altogether. The true squirrels are found everywhere, except in Madagascar and Australasia. Some of the tropical species are very brightly coloured, some of the American are striped, and some of the Siberian are white; the largest are found in Malaysia, the prettiest being our own common squirrel (Sciurus vulgarzs), which is found all across Europe and Asia away to Japan. In America this squirrel is represented by the chickaree (S. hudsonianus), which is the boldest of his tribe, and seems to have no fear of man. Sir Francis Head has a capital anecdote with regard to this fearlessness. ‘I was waiting,’ he says, ‘the approach of a large flock of wildfowl; but a little villain of a squirrel on the bough of a tree close to me, seemed to have determined that even now I should not rest in quiet; for he sputtered and chattered with so much vehemence that he attracted the attention of my dog. This was truly mortifying, for he kept his eyes fixed on the squirrel; with my hand I threatened the little beast, but he actually set up his back and defied me, becoming even more passionate than before, till all of a sudden, as if purposely to alarm the game, he dropped plump within a couple of yards of Rover’s nose. This was too much for the latter to bear ; so he gave a bounce and sprang upon the impertinent squirrel, who in a second was out of his reach, cocking his tail and CHIPMUNKS 1i3 showing his teeth, on the identical bough where he had sat before. Away flew all the wildfowl, and my sport was completely marred. My gun went involun- tarily to my shoulder to shoot the squirrel ; but I felt I was about to commit an act of sheer revenge on a courageous little animal which deserved a better fate. As if aware of my hesitation, he nodded his head with rage and stamped his fore paws on the tree, while in his chirruping there was an intonation of sound which seemed like contempt. What business had I there, trespassing on his domain and frightening his wife and little family, for whom he was ready to lay down his life? There he would sit in spite of me, and make my ears ring with the sound of his woo-whoop till the spring of life should cease to bubble in his little heart.’ The ground-squirrels, or chipmunks, belong to another genus, Tamdas, represented in both Siberia and North America. They are generally found on the ground, but occasionally take to the trees, where, however, they never leap from branch to branch. The sousliks, or gophers, belonging to the genus Spermo- philus, may be looked upon as marmots with large cheek-pouches. In America they have long tails, and bear some resemblance to the chipmunks ; in Europe and Asia they have all, with one exception, short tails. Closely allied to them are the North American prairie- marmots, prairie-dogs, or barking squirrels, who live in great groups of burrows called ‘dog-towns,’ with a granary for the storage of food and a good-sized mound thrown up here and there which they use as a watch tower. These belong to the genus Cynomiys, The true marmots (A rctomys) are of somewhat similar H 114 MAMMALS habits, and are found in both hemispheres, the Asiatic species all living in barren districts. One of the species (A. monax) is the woodchuck, so often men- tioned in American books. The flying squirrels are of considerable age, their remains having been unearthed in the middle tertiaries of Europe. Nowadays there is but one European species, the polatouche (Sczuropterus volans), which is found in Russia and Siberia, and is a handsome little animal about six inches long, tawny above and white below. In North America there is but one species (S. volucella), whichis greyish aboveand cream-coloured below. All the other species are found in India or Malaysia ; some of them will glide for eighty yards in the air from tree to tree, but their flight is always slightly downwards. The beavers havea family tothemselves(Castor¢de). One of the fossil beavers was five feet long, and there were several species of them. There are but two living species, Castor fiber of the Old World, and C. cana- denszs of the New, and these are the largest of the rodents except the capybara. They are also the most intelligent, particularly the American beaver. He is not only a mere burrower as his European relative is becoming to be, but an architect and an engineer. He builds his lodge of wood of his own felling, and these lodges are in towns, and in association with his fellow- townsmen; he builds a dam to keep the water ata convenient level, and even excavates a canal to bring the trees along on whose bark and wood he feeds. The work he does is wonderful. Mr. Baillie-Grohman describes how he once watched a party at work. ‘It = SS THE RUSSIAN FLYING SQUIRREL 116 MAMMALS was an interesting sight to watch the old paterfamilias set to work on a previously felled trunk ; soon followed by several more youthful labourers, scions, probably, of the diligent foreman of the works. With amazing energy their sharp, ever-gnawing tools plied through the wood, the shavings in width corresponding to the gouge-shaped edge of their teeth, now and again jerked aside with a comic, vicious-looking toss of the bullet-shaped head. Unfortunately, not having a watch, I was unable to time the speed with which the logs were cut. I should say that half an hour amply covered the period occupied in cutting one log of about ten inches in diameter. While standing, trees are gnawed round the circumference from nine inches to fifteen inches from the ground, the deepest cutting being done on the side towards which the tree is to fall; felled trunks too heavy to turn over offer more difficulties, the greater portion of the gnawing having to be done from the uppermost side ; hence, also, it is easy to know, by the surface of the cut, whether a tree has been worked on while standing or when prostrated on the ground. These logs supply, I am inclined to think, a twofold want; for not only is the bark welcome winter provender, but their bulky nature makes them good building material wherewith to dam up the base of a dyke.’ When beavers have got a tree down, they cut off the branches and clear away the twigs before setting to work to cut it up into short lengths, and these lengths are always in proportion to the thickness of the tree, the thicker trees being in shorter sections. ‘In moving cuttings of this descrip- tion, says Mr. Morgan, ‘they are quite ingenious. BEAVERS 117 They shove and roll them with their hips, using also their legs and tails as levers, moving sideways in the act. In this way they move the larger pieces from the more or less elevated ground on which the de- BEAVERS = ciduous trees are found over the uneven but generally descending surface to the pond. After one of these cuttings has been transported to the water, a beaver, placing one end of it under his throat, pushes it before 118 MAMMALS him to the place where it is to be sunk.’ Many of the beaver dams are three or four hundred feet long, and perhaps a dozen feet or more in width, with occasion- ally a single furrow in the crest for the water to escape through when the stream is at the average level. Some of these constructions are 1,000 years old, and owing to the work of the beaver in the present and the past large tracts of country have been covered with water, and meadows formed where once the forest grew. The beavers are the last of the Sccuromorpha ; in the Myomorpha there are four families—Myoxde, consisting of the dormice; Murid@, comprising the other mice and rats and voles ; Geomyzde, represented by the American pouched rat; and Dizpodid@, embrac- ing the jerboas. In all these, as in the hares and rabbits, the tibia and fibula are joined at the end, whereas among the squirrels the shank-bones are always separate. The dormice are recognisable at once by their bushy tails, the jerboas by their long hindlegs. The mouse family are represented all over the world, even in Australia; and it is no exaggera- tion to say that they live in millions. In Germany the hamsters are so numerous that in one year in one district alone 100,000 were killed; in America the white-footed mouse is as common as the ordinary mouse is in England; the voles occasionally swarm in such numbers as to constitute a veritable plague ; the lemmings migrate in huge armies across Norway, clearing everything in their track, like so many ants keeping straight on, even swimming rivers and climb- ing mountains, crowding on in countless thousands FIELD VOLES 120 MAMMALS to be drowned in the sea. The black rat came from Asia in the twelfth century to swarm allover Europe ; the brown rat, from Central Asia, swam the Volga in thousands in 1727, to almost wipe out the black rat, and spread not only over Europe, but take ship to America and there increase quite as alarmingly. So plentiful are the brown rats of Paris that over 16,000 a month are killed in the slaughterhouses. Some of the small rodents are really beautiful, one of the prettiest being the harvest mouse, the smallest but one of our native mammals, which was discovered by Gil- bert White of Selborne, and makes a nest of woven grass blades about as big as a cricket ball, and feeds its young from the outside of it, clinging to the grass as it does so by its prehensile tail. The third group of rodents with only two incisor teeth is that containing the porcupines. Most of these are American. The coypu, known in commerce and in its South American home as the nutria, is one of the largest of the family, and is often over two feet long ; the West Indian hutias also attain respectable sizes. Another conspicuous member of this group is the porcupine—that is, the ‘spiny pig,’ called a pig be- cause of its grunting powers—which is found in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and has allies in America which climb trees and have prehensile tails. The largest of all the rodents is the South American capybara, whose habits are those of a hippopotamus and who is nearly a yard in length. Close akin to him in structure are the cavies or guinea-pigs, so-called owing to a limited knowledge of geography which confused Guinea on the West Coast of Africa, where the cavies do not exist, HARVEST MICE 122 MAMMALS with Guiana in the north-east of South America, where they are found in abundance. The second sub-order of rodents—those with four upper incisors—need not detain us long. It comprises the picas, which have hardly any tails, and the common hares and rabbits. The picas are found in THE PORCUPINE the mountains of Northern Asia, in the south-eastern district of Europe, and on the slopes of the Rockies. There are about a dozen species of them, the best known being Lagomys alpinus, which is continually whistling like a woodpecker. Of the hares and rabbits we need say nothing, except, perhaps, to recall the fact that Cowper the poet found hares almost as intelligent CETACEA 123 as dogs. One of his pets would, he says, ‘invite me to the garden by drumming upon my knee, and by a look of such expression as it was not possible to misinterpret. If this rhetoric did not immediately succeed, he would take the skirt of my coat between his teeth and pull it with all his force. CETACEA.— In this order are grouped most of the mammals that live in the water. Like the mammals of the land, their young are born alive, and are fed with milk in their babyhood; and the mothers bear great affection towards their offspring, and will even risk their lives in shielding them from danger. They all have horizontal tails and no hind limbs, although the rudiments of legs are often found within the body frame. They all breathe air, and have an elaborate development of blood-vessels enabling them to take their breathing leisurely, long intervals elapsing be- tween their inspirations. They are conveniently sorted into two main divisions, those with teeth and those without, the toothed division including the dolphins and some of the whales, the toothless consisting of the whalebone whales; the relationship between the two being so distant that it has been proposed to have two separate orders for them instead of one. The toothless whales have their mouths furnished, more or less abundantly, with the baleen or whale- bone plates through which they strain off the mouth- fuls of water in which they catch the multitude of small animals on which they live. The right whales have the most baleen and the smallest throats ; ‘a herring, as the sailors say, ‘is big enough to choke 124 MAMMALS them ;’ they manage to swim upright without a fin to their back, and they have no wrinkles about the throat. The rorquals (vork-wals) are the whales with the ‘rorks’ or wrinkles under the throat ; they have a longish back-fin somewhat like a hook in shape; and they feed chiefly on codfish. Intermediate between these are the grey whale of the North Pacific with no fin on the back, the pigmy whale of Australasia with a very small back-fin and a smooth throat-skin, and the humpback whale of most seas, with a rather larger back-fin and a wrinkled throat-skin, the fin rising from a sort of hump, the animal’s head being proportionately larger than among the rorquals. The baleen whales can be distinguished from the others at a glance by the way they ‘blow.’ The nostrils of a baleen whale are at the top of his. head, and he spouts vertically, while the nostrils of the others are at the tip of their snout, and they spout diagonally forwards —the spouting being, it need hardly be said, the humid heated air expelled from the lungs, which condenses as it ascends and often takes some of the surface water up with it. The whale only blows when he rises and just before he dives, at other times he will float at his ease on the surface, breathing quietly like any other mammal. The Greenland whale blows for seven times or more, and then dives for a quarter of © an hour, although a harpooned whale has been known to stay under water for fifty minutes. This whale, like all the right whales, is never very brisk in his movements. His ordinary swimming speed is four miles an hour, with a power of working up to eight -in times of peril. The rorquals are a much more THE WHALE 125 active lot, and some of them, according to the Finnish whalers, can remain under water for eight or twelve hours at a time when taking their daily rest. One of them, the blue whale (Balenoptera Sibbaldt), is the big- gest and fastest mammal in existence, measuring from eighty to ninety feet and more in length and travelling thirty knots an hour. Like all the whales, he migrates in search of food, and during the year visits many seas. Scoresby says that rorquals a hundred and twenty feet long have been known. In 1828 one was found floating off Ostend which was ninety-five feet long and had a tail 22 ft. 6 in. wide; and even larger ones are on record. Of the toothed cetaceans the sperm-whale is the biggest, but he rarely exceeds fifty feet in length. He was the only whale that was fished for until the discovery, in the sixteenth century, of the Greenland whale, which is about the same size. He feeds, like most of his family, on squids and cuttles, and in the ambergris which is formed in his intestines the horny beaks of these cephalopods are almost invariably found ; but he will eat almost any kind of fish. He is not particularly prepossessing in appearance, a fourth of his length being devoted to a head which is chiefly noticeable for its massiveness. He has only rudimentary teeth in his upper jaw, but in his lower jaw he has from forty to fifty substantial stumps, all ivory and all rounded like pegs, which fit into a groove above them, so that when the mouth is closed there is no escape from destruction. His mouth is white, his tongue is white, and his throat is large, and it has been suggested that when seeking food he remains at 126 ' ' MAMMALS rest with his mouth wide open, and snaps his jaws together when anything he fancies comes swimming into them. His top speed is twelve knots, and when he rises to blow he is about twelve minutes at the surface, and he dives to enormous depths, having been known to run out nearly a mile of line when harpooned. This is the large sperm- -whale or cachalot, Physeter macrocephalus ; the small sperm-whale, Cogda breviceps, is more like a porpoise. The other sperm- whales are found only as fossils, all from comparatively recent rocks, the whales apparently not dating vely, far back in the past. F The xiphioid whales have only two or four teeth in the lower jaw, the most familiar of this group being the North Atlantic bottlehead (Hyperiodon rostratus), which has but two, and these hidden inthe gum. The bottlehead, so called from the lump in front of the blow-hole, is about thirty feet long ; he is black when he is young, and turns yellow and white as he grows old; and, like the sperm-whale, he yields sperm- oil and spermaceti, or substances so similar to them that they answer the same purposes. He does not always keep to the open sea: he is frequently found in the English Channel, and he was once caught above London Bridge. Like all the whales, he has not much of a neck to speak of, but like all of them, and like nearly all other mammals, he has just as many vertebree in it—seven—as there are in the neck of the giraffe. The dolphins and porpoises are all grouped as Delphinide. There are a large number of them, most of them being marine, some estuarine, and a few j : : . . : : THE NARWHAL : 127 even fresh-water. The fresh-water dolphins, properly so called, are assigned, however, to the family called after Platanista, the generic name of the blind dolphin of the Ganges. To the naturalist there is much interest in these fresh-water forms, owing to Sir William Flower’s suggestion that in their transition from terrestrial to marine life, the cetaceans may have passed through a stage in which they lived on river banks and in rivers, fog which they afterwards mi- grated to the sea. Belonging to this dolphin-like group is the white whale, often over sixteen feet long, almost pure white in colour, and without a back-fin. Resembling it in everything but its teeth, is the narwhal, or sea unicorn. This extraordinary animal has only two teeth worth noticing, both of which are in the upper _ jaw. Occasionally both of these grow out like tusks, but as a rule the one on the right side remains in a rudimentary state, as both do in the case of the females, and the other runs out straight for six feet or so. What the narwhal does with his horn is not very clear. Some travellers tell us that he uses it asa fork to skewer up the flat-fish from the bottom of the sea ; never, however, does he seem to have been caught in the act ; and though his portraits are many, we have not yet come across an unfortunate turbot spitted like cat’s-meat on his tapering tooth ; nor is it clear how the female would get on unless her mate fed her with the fork. Others relate how it is used as a gimlet for boring blow-holes in the ice, but the statement is not made from personal observation. Others describe it as a weapon of offence and defence, used much as THE DOLPHIN 129 the sword was in the duels of the past by the rival suitors for a lady’s hand, and aver that narwhals are occasionally seen engaged in friendly fencing matches —which may or may not be true. At any rate, its end is always worn and polished, so that it would seem to be in constant use. The dolphin himself, Delphinus delphis, is not in the least like his heraldic presentment, so typically shown in the lamps on the Thames Embankment. He is dark on the back and satiny white beneath, but not even in the agonies of death does he change colour, though, like all other dead things, the body becomes slightly phosphorescent during decompo- sition. Like the porpoise, his flesh is good eating. In tenderness and flavour dolphin is to porpoise what lamb is to mutton. He is the common dolphin of all seas, and the real original Heeros zcthys. He is not a fish, but a carnivorous cetacean with interlocking teeth, and a convex snout separated from the fore- head by a furrow. He is larger than the porpoise, averaging nine feet in length; and ‘he is one of the swiftest mammals that swim. He is almost the greediest ; his teeth enable him to seize his prey, but not to nip it,and he swallows his foodalive and whole like the rest of his family. He is the reputed foe of the flying-fish, though the distinction really belongs almost entirely to his fishy namesake, known other- wise as the dorado. _The porpoise, Phocena communis, is the most familiar cetacean around our coasts. He is at once distinguishable by his teeth, which are about twenty in number and have compressed spade-shaped crowns. I 130 MAMMALS Porpoises feed on fish, and follow the shoals for days, being often captured in the fishermen’s nets. Their peculiarly graceful curves as they rise from the water to breathe and dive again, and the speed at which they swim, are well known. The back-fin, so con- spicuous in the common porpoise, is absent in the Indian one. As porpoises feed on fish, so they, in their turn, are fed on, one of their greatest enemies being one of their own family, the grampus, which is the only cetacean preying on cetaceans. A grampus has been known to swallow four porpoises one after another. The grampus, Orca gladiator, otherwise the killer whale, is the powerful swimmer with the big back-fin, met with in all the world’s seas, and occa- sionally up many of its rivers. There were even three killers in the Thames one spring morning in 1890, disporting themselves off Battersea Park. They swim in packs, and so fierce are they that they master the Greenland whale, and will swim into his mouth to eat out his tongue. The killer has from forty to fifty teeth, which are much larger than those of any other dolphin, but are of the usual peg-like shape, which it has been endeavoured to derive from the splitting up into threes of some such trilobed teeth as appear-in a few of the seals. UNGULATA.—In this order are grouped the animals whose toe-nails are more or less expanded into hoofs. It contains a very large number of species of the first importance in the food-supply of man. The cattle and sheep, the deer and horses A SCHOOL OF PORPOISES 12 132 MAMMALS and pigs and elephants, all in it find their place, forming such a vast assemblage that any survey of it would be hopelessly involved without a little pre- liminary elimination. In the first place, then, we can set aside the elephants, which are so distinguishable by their trunks that they have been relegated to a separate sub-order, the Proboscidea. Closely allied to them are the little hyraces, or coneys, which have a sub-order all to themselves, the Hyracotdea. The extinct sub-orders need not detain us, and we are left with an enormous crowd that we can halve into those who have the middle toe larger than the rest, and those in whom the third and fourth toes are equally developed, so as to form the familiar ‘cloven hoof’ These latter are the even-toed ungulates, the Artiodactyla (from the Greek avizos, even, and daktulos, a finger or toe). The others are the Perissodactyla, in which the ‘ perisso’ comes from the Greek perzssos, uneven. The even-toed group we can split up into four sections. First, there are the Swzva, including the pigs, peccaries, and hippopotami; then there are the Zylopoda, or pad-foots, comprising the camels and llamas; then there are the Pecora, including the deer, giraffes, antelopes, sheep and cattle ; and lastly we are left with the 7vagulena, or chevrotains, par- taking at one and the same time of the characteristics of the pigs, the camels, and the deer, and forming an intermediate series that cannot well be assigned to any one of the other three. The pecora are ruminants, for they all chew the cud. They have a complicated stomach of three or, more generally, four chambers, known respectively as THE RUMINANTS 133 the rumen, or paunch, to the left of the gullet, and the retzculum, or honey-comb bag, the psaltertum, or moniplies, and the abomasum, or reed, to the right of the gullet. While the animal grazes the food goes into the paunch, but when the animal rests the softened food is returned to the mouth for further chewing, and thence, avoiding the paunch to the left, it passes to the right, by way of the honey-comb bag and psal- terium, into the reed, which is the stomach in which digestion takes place. The ruminants are separable into four groups, of which the Cervide and Bovide are the chief; the intermediate two being the Guirafide, to which belong the giraffes, and the Azztlocapride, to which belongs the prong-buck, or North American antelope. The Cervide are the deer; the Bovide are all the ruminants with hollow horns, except the prong-buck. It will be apparent at once that even the Bovidee might have a book to themselves. What an array they make! All the cattle, with and without humps, the musk-ox, the sheep, the goats, and antelopes in all their varieties, wild and domesticated, none of which ever shed their horns. The cattle have smooth, untwisted horns, and are all assigned to the genus Bos, the chief species being B. taurus. This includes the aurochs, now extinct, but to a certain extent represented by the Chillingham and other wild cattle of our British parks, and the domestic breeds that come to the butcher. The Indian domestic cattle, all of whom are humped, are assigned to B. zudicus. The tallest of the cattle, standing six feet at the shoulder, is the white-stock- 134 MAMMALS inged Indian gaur, B. gaurus. Another remarkable species, wild and domestic, is B. grunniens, the yak of Tibet, so conspicuous for its long hair and bushy tail. The European bison, 5. donassus, is now extinct except in the Caucasus and the preserves of Lithuania. The American bison, B. americanus, is in much the same state; the last herd was destroyed in 1883, but there are a few left in Athabasca, and about two hundred and fifty are preserved in the Yellow- stone Park. It is the biggest American mammal, but is much smaller than the extinct B. latifrons, whose remains are found in Texas. The Cape buffalo, B. caffer, is also going the way of the big oxen. The Indian buffalo, B. dubalus, with the tremendous horns—there is a pair at South Kensington measuring over twelve feet from tip to tip—is also thinning out rapidly. The musk-ox, Ovzbos moschatus, is a sheep- like ox, still found in herds in Arctic America, but extinct in Europe and Asia: the fate of all these big animals being the same—they domesticate or perish. There are eleven species of wild sheep now living, one of them being African and one American. The American species, or ‘bighorn, Oves canadensis, being perhaps the best known to sportsmen. The horns of this species are very large and weigh as much as forty pounds, the basal girth occasionally reaching nineteen inches ; but, like all horns, they shrink very much in the dry air of museums. At one time the bighorn was said to use these enormous horns as buffers to fall upon when jumping from high crags, but this motive is now laughed at. It is, however, an THE AMERICAN BISON 136 MAMMALS undoubted fact that a ram shot near the base of the horns will drop stunned as if dead. Mr. Baillie-Grohman gives an amusing instance of this. ‘The ram fell as if struck by lightning, a fortu- nate circumstance, as he was standing on a very narrow ledge, overhanging a lofty precipice. The slightest THE MUSK OX struggle would have sent him headlong down the abyss, a fall which would have smashed his horns to splinters. When, by crawling along the narrow ledge, the only possible approach, I got to my quarry, he seemed as dead asa stone. Where he lay his body occupied the whole width of the ledge, his legs stretch- ANECDOTE OF A BIGHORN 137 ing over the narrow cornice of rock, while his hind- quarters lay towards me. Elated with my success, I was hotly eager to know the size of the head, so, whipping out my tape-measure, and not noticing any- thing else, I stretched over the body, and using both hands, had succeeded in encircling one of the massive horns with the ribbon, when I suddenly felt myself heaved up ; and before I had time to regain a kneeling position the ram was on his legs, flinging me back like a feather. Luckily, he threw me so that I kept my equilibrium. My rifle I had left behind, at the place I had shot from; and my knife I, of course, could not use, owing to the rapidity of the whole thing, and the precarious nature of the ground. The ram stood for half a minute, as if paralysed, and then, with a rapid and very peculiar motion of his body, which I had never noticed before, made off along the ledge, my measuring-tape fluttering in a loose coil round his right horn’ In Mexico the bighorn is hunted with dogs. It is rapidly becoming extinct. Where herds of hundreds were at one time seen, it is now a rare experience to find fifty together. The Kamtschatkan sheep, O. mévécola, is much like the bighorn, but has rounded ears instead of pointed ones, and has no dark stripe down the back. In the Mongolian argali, O. amon, and the Tibetan nyan, O. Hodgsonz, the horns are much more wrinkled on the anterior surface. The wild sheep of the Pamirs, Marco Polo’s sheep, O. Podz, lives in the Asiatic highlands at an average of twelve thousand feet above the sea. Its horns are narrower than those just noticed, and turn more outwards, and they are longer, 138 MAMMALS some specimens having been measured at five feet along the curve. The wild sheep of Europe is the mouflon, now found only in Corsica and Sardinia ; its horns curve outwards over the face and backwards over the head, and rarely exceed twenty-eight inches in length. The horns of the bharal or nahoor, the blue sheep of Tibet, are more goat-like in character, THE ALPINE IBEX and may measure thirty inches in length, The African species is the maned sheep of Barbary, O. tragelaphus, which is also found in Baluchistan and in Asia Minor. The flocks of this sheep always place one of their number as a sentinel, and the duty is taken in turns, the youngest going on guard first. The horns of the goats are placed more upright THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN GOAT 139 on the head than those of the sheep. Asa rule they are flattened at the sides and roughened with cross ridges, and are either keeled in front or triangular in section ; but the distinctions between the two genera are hardly marked enough to say definitely where a goat begins and a sheep leaves off. Among the more striking species of Capra are the Himalayan and Arabian ibexes, and also the European one, or bouquetin, which being, however, only now known living as preserved at Monte Rosa, can hardly be considered a wild species. The four Himalayan markhors are another fine group, with long spiral horns and flowing. beards. Some of their horns, particularly those of the Cabul variety, have reached fifty inches and more along the curve. The Rocky Mountain goat, Haploceros montanus, has the unique distinction of being the only game animal that increases in number. He is white in his coat, and black in his eyes, his muzzle, his horns and his hoofs. He lives mostly among the snow, and can climb a cliff with the least slope or ruggedness by sheer muscular effort ; but he has also been found at the sea-level swimming across river mouths. This goat does not butt; he thrusts with his short sharply pointed horns, which are only ringed for about half their height. The chamois, Rupicapra tragus, is an- other intermediate form between the goats and the antelopes. The chamois is supposed to bea peculiarly Swiss animal, but it is found under many aliases in all the mountain ranges of Northern Europe, from the Pyrenees to the Caucasus. The rest of the Bovéde are known as antelopes, aE SFI ia THE CABUL MARKHOR 4 i g ' ' : ANTELOPES i4t but they vary so much in size and character from the big ox-like elands to the hare-like royal antelopes little more than a foot high, that itis not easy to frame a definition to embrace themall. As a rule, however, the bony centre of their horns is solid and not cellular. Some of the larger antelopes in their molar teeth show resemblance to the oxen, while the gazelles more nearly approach the sheep. The antelopes are mostly African, there being about a hundred species in the dark continent; a few are Asiatic. There is only one antelope in America, but, as we have seen, HEAD OF GEMSBOK he differs so much from the rest that he has a family all to himself. One of the handsomest of the antelopes is the kudu (Strepstceros kudu), with long corkscrew horns and striped body. The harnessed antelopes, 7rag- elaphus, form another striking genus. Among the other large antelopes may be mentioned the addax, with lyre-shaped horns, ; the gemsbok, Oryx gazella, with long straight horns; the beisa, O. dezsa, with horns of much the same character ; the sabre-horn, O. leucoryx ; the sable or black antelope, which is really chestnut- WATER-BUCK ee WATER-BUCK 143 brown in colour, Azppotragus niger; and the allied species 7. eguznus, the roan antelope. The graceful gazelles have white cheeks as a rule, with a brownish line extending from the eye to the muzzle. Many of them have lyrate horns ringed for nearly the whole of their length, and oval in section. The little dorcas gazelle, Gagella dorcas, was described by Aélian. Its range extends all along Northern Africa into Asia Minor. The springbok, G. euchore, is exclusively South African, and migrates in millions from feeding ground to feeding ground. Besides the Indian species, G. Bennetti, often spoken of as the ravine-deer, there are three other Asiatic gazelles, one of them in Tibet at a height of 18,000 feet. Round Kilima-njaro ranges Grant’s gazelle ; in Masailand is Thomson’s gazelle ; in Somaliland is Soemmerring’s gazelle, with somewhat heavier horns than the others. In Somaliland there lives the dibatag, which is an intermediate form between the gazelles and the long-necked gerenuk. In Western Asia lives the ugly saiga, with the bloated nose, and in South Africa the graceful pala with the lyrate horns, and the somewhat bulky water- buck, known to all the shooters of big game. The black-buck of the Indian sportsman is the only species now left in the once extensive genus Anézlope, from which is derived the familiar name. The smallest of the group, and, in fact, the smallest of the ruminants, is Vanotragus pygmaeus, one of the steinboks, the ‘royal antelope’ of Western Equatorial Africa, which is rarely over a foot high, and therefore slightly smaller than the tiny Salt’s antelope of the Red Sea Coast, or Kirk's antelope of further south, 144 MAMMALS Another noteworthy antelope is the chousingha, Tetraceros quadricornis, the only living ruminant with four horns. Yet another that must not be passed unmentioned is the gnu, or wildebeest, with horns of much the same structure as those of the cattle, and in other respects representative of the last batch of antelopes. The giraffe has the same dental formula as a sheep, the typical ruminant formula of 0033 over 3133, and would probably be classed with the Boude if it were not for perhaps the most insignificant thing about him, namely, his three ‘horns.’ Two of these prominences are really bones which at birth are separate from the skull but unite with it later on. They are covered with skin and not horn, and to a certain extent are one step further on the road from those of the prong- buck to those of the deer. The third ‘horn’ is a protuberance on the front of the skull forming a triangle with the other two. The extinct giraffes had these bony processes, which are also traceable in allied fossil genera such as sivatherium, which was the biggest ruminant that, as far as we yet know, has walked the face of this earth. In short, the giraffe is not one by himself, but the last representative of an old and numerous and lofty family. Like all the big ‘animals, he is fast disappearing. There are a few left in the Kalahari desert and in the north of the Soudan ; if any person will bring one alive, in sound health and condition, to Regent’s Park, he will receive 1,000/. The deer are unknown in Africa south of the Sahara, where the antelopes take their place. They may be regarded in a general way as ruminants that GIRAFFES 146 MAMMALS shed their horns ; but the earliest deer had no horns, the next earliest had simple antlers with only two branches, and in the modern deer we have species with no horns, species with simple horns, species in which the male only has horns, and one species, the reindeer, in which both the males and females have horns and do not shed them. The deer of the Eastern Hemisphere mostly belong tothe genus Cervus. The red-deer, C. elaphus, is found in Europe, North Africa, and Asia Minor, and perhaps further eastward ; but in this country and in Central Europe it would have been extinct long ago © had it not been protected. In Kashmir the red-deer is represented by the closely allied hangul, in North- Eastern India by the larger shou. A somewhat similar species to these is the North American wapiti, C. canadensis, still plentiful in the wooded western mountains. Like all the deer, the males of this species fight very much during the pairing season. As an example of this we may quote from Mr. T. Roosevelt, who describes a characteristic battle which he wit- nessed. He says: ‘Two bull elk were engaged in deadly combat while two others were looking on. It was a splendid sight. The great beasts faced each other with lowered horns, the manes that covered their thick necks and the hair on their shoulders bristling and erect. Then they charged furiously, the crash of the meeting antlers resounding through the valley. The shock threw them both on their haunches ; with locked horns and glaring eyes they strove against each other, getting their hind legs well under them, straining every muscle in their huge bodies, and squealing’ REINDEER 147 savagely. They were evenly matched in weight, strength, and courage; and push as they might neither got the upper hand, first one yielding a few inches, then the other, while they swayed to and fro in their struggles, smashing the bushes and ploughing up the soil. Finally they separated and stood some little distance apart, under the great pines ; their sides REINDEER heaving, and columns of steam rising from their nostrils through the frosty air of the brightening morning. And several times did the struggle re- commence, to end indecisively. The wapiti has twelve or more points in his antlers ; - some have fourteen points, besides irregular prongs. The Asiatic deer are very numerous, and are nearly all K2 148 MAMMALS distinguishable by the number of tines in their antlers. The fallow deer, which is European and North African, has the upper part of the antler flattened out consi- derably. The muntjacs have their horns on bony projections from the skull, The Chinese tufted deer have rudimentary antlers on converging bony projec- tions. The reindeer is distinguished by the very large brow tine. The caribou is the American representa- tive of the reindeer. His hoofs are very long and round, longer than a wapiti’s or moose’s, and larger than a cow’s. He can cross very thin ice by spreading out his hoofs and bending his legs until he almost runs upon his joints. The moose is found in Northern Europe as well as in Northern America, where he has been driven to take refuge along the Rocky Mountains. He is chiefly characterised by enormous development of his muzzle. The roe-deer has only three tines to his antlers, which rise some distance from his head before they branch. The Virginian deer has his antlers in the form of spikes rising upright from a curving main fork. The mule-deer is as easily recog- nisable by his long ears as the moose is by his muzzle ; the brockets have mere spikes instead of antlers ; and the musk-deer have no antlers at all, but long tusks curving downwards from the upper jaw, the same things, in fact, as the upper tusks of a boar. The chevrotains, or mouse-deer, are small deer-like animals about as big as rabbits, grouped by themselves as being intermediate in structure between the deer, the camels, and the pig. They have three divisions in their stomach instead of four, and they have four complete toes on each foot, the second and fifth being, THE MOUSE-DEER 149 cneeihien came ecient emnensien ence however, slender. The water chevrotain is a West African species, worth remembrance from the fact that its genus, Dorcatherium, was founded on fossil specimens, the living species, confirming the accuracy of the restoration, being discovered long afterwards. THE MOOSE Chevrotains and their allies are well represented in the Miocene rocks of Europe and America. The type genus, Zragudus, ranges nowadays from India to Borneo. The Tylopoda include the camels of the Eastern 150 MAMMALS Hemisphere and the llamas of the Western. Although the family has few representatives now, it was at one time very numerous, chiefly, curiously enough, in America, whence it seems that the camels came into Asia by way of Alaska. Both the camels and the llamas have stomachs with three chambers, and in two of these are the so-called water-cells, which can be filled with fluid and closed by a sphincter muscle in much the same way as a baleen whale can shut his throat as he drives ahead through the water. The dental formula is 1133 over 3123. Unlike all the other mammals, this family has oval red blood © corpuscles instead of circular ones. The spreading padded feet and the water-cells of the camel have made it invaluable to man in sandy deserts, and its appearance in history is of the remotest. The wild camel has been said for nearly five hundred years to exist in the neighbourhood of Lob-Nor, and recently Mr. Littledale went to Central Asia in search of them, and some of the skins of the animals he shot are now at South Kensington. But it is very doubt- ful if these should not be looked upon as ‘feral’ instead of wild—that is, the descendants of animals which have escaped from captivity, like the so-called ‘wild’ camels of Arizona, Spain, and Australia. The camel’s reputation does not stand as high as it did amongst Europeans; on closer acquaintance they have found him as stupid as he is ungainly, and by a long way the least satisfactory of the world’s beasts of burden. According to Palgrave, ‘If docile means stupid, well and good ; in such a case the camel is the very model of docility. But if the epithet is CAMELS 152 MAMMALS intended to designate an animal that takes an interest _in its rider so far as a beast can, that in some way understands his intentions, or shares them in a subordinate fashion, that obeys from a sort of sub- missive or half fellow-feeling with his master, like the horse or elephant, then I say that the camel is by no means docile—very much the contrary. He takes no heed of his rider, pays no attention whether he be on his back or not ; walks straight on when once set agoing, merely because he is too stupid to turn aside ; and then, should some tempting thorn or green branch allure him out of the path, continues to walk on in the new direction simply because he is too dull to turn back into the right road. In fact, he is from first to last an undomesticated and savage animal, rendered serviceable by stupidity alone, without much skill on his master’s part or any co-operation on his own, save that of an extreme passiveness. Neither attachment nor even habit impresses him; never tame, though not wide-awake enough to be exactly wild.” And this unfavourable opinion is shared in by all the explorers and others who have had any experience of camel- keeping and camel-riding. In short, the Oriental made the most of the camel as being the only animal available in the great sandy regions of Asia and Africa, but was never enthusiastic in his praise ; and there is a vast difference between the way in which he speaks of his heavily lurching ‘ship of the desert’ and that in which he speaks of his horse. There are two species of Camelus, C. dromedarius, with one hump, and C. dactrianus, with two. The wild camels discovered by the Russians among the LLAMAS 154 MAMMALS Central Asian mountains have two humps which are very small, but the size of the hump, at least in the domesticated varieties, depends very much on the amount of food and the season of the year. The food of these Lob-Nor camels—which are of a reddish hue, with short ears and a grizzly muzzle—consists of the branches and leaves of trees, which is exactly what one would have supposed the original wild camels sub- sisted on, judging from their anatomy. The llamas, in the usual acceptation of the term, include the vicunia and the guanaco, besides the domes- ticated varieties, alpaca and llama, all of which belong to the genus Lama. The guanaco, L. guanacus, is the largest living representative of the genus, which in some of its fossil allies was as large as any of the existing camels. Like the vicunia, which is a smaller animal, its toes are more divided than a camel’s, and . have separate pads, while the hoofs are even more like nails. The extinct species, however, show many of the intermediate stages. The llama, Z. glama, is a guanaco, bred for centuries as a beast of burden; the alpaca, L. pacos, is a guanaco, bred for its wool. The vicunia is practically restricted to the Peruvian region, but the range of the guanaco extends from the equator to the sandy deserts of Patagonia, where it seems to be most at home. Guanacos have even been found living at large in Tierra del Fuego. The domesticated camel refuses to swim ; the guanaco will not only swim in the sea, but drink salt water. Of the next group, Swzza, there are three divisions —the peccaries, with four toes in front and three behind ; the pigs, with four toes in front, only two of THE HOG-DEER OF CELEBES 156 MAMMALS which reach the ground, and four behind ; and the hippopotami, with four toes on the ground both back and front. In the peccaries the upper canines grow downwards; in the pigs they grow upwards or out- wards ; the peccaries, too, have a complex stomach, while the stomach of the pigs is a simple one with a cardiac pouch. The peccaries are found in America, the pigs in the Old World. Among the intermediate forms elucidating the old relationship was the Titan pig of India, which was as tallas a horse. The pigmy hog of India is not much larger than a hare. It is a curious fact that the young of all the wild pigs are striped. The most extraordinary pig is the hog-deer of Celebes and other islands of Malaysia. This is a hairless species, Babcrusa alfurus, in which the upper canines grow through the upper lip so as to project like horns, and often form an almost complete circle, while the lower canines grow upwards to almost as great a length. The last of the Artiodactyls, or even-toed ungu- lates, are the hippopotami. These are all assigned to one genus having several species, most of them extinct, one of them as much larger than 7, appopotamus amphibius as the mammoth was larger than the elephant. Two species are living, both of them African, but fossil hippopotami have been found in India, in Madagascar, and even in Yorkshire. The Liberian hippo lives on the West Coast of Africa. He is a little over two feet high, and under six feet long. The better known H. amphibius is a giant in comparison. He can swim, he can dive, he can walk along the bed of the rivers under water—and he can ANECDOTE OF A HIPPOPOTAMUS 157 come up again most unexpectedly. ‘Shortly after we had set off this morning,’ says Mr. H. H. Johnston, ‘I was startled considerably, and my breakfast went flying out of my lap at the sudden and unexpected bump which a big hippopotamus gave to the bottom THE COMMON HIPPOPOTAMUS of the boat. If we had been in a canoe he would, ot course, have wrecked us; as it was, although he did no great harm, yet on afterwards examining the keel we found a decided dent in it where he had struck the iron. I felt so cross at having my nice break- 158 MAMMALS fast scattered over the luggage, that I seized my Winchester, and fired it at his head as the great creature lifted it from the water a few yards off to see what damage he had done.” When the hippo rises he blows from his nostrils much as if he were a whale, but when he dives he goes down tail first. He has a terribly large mouth with awkward- looking teeth, but he feeds only on vegetables, and requires a stomach over ten feet long in which to digest them. SKULL OF THE HIPPOPOTAMUS The ungulates with the odd toes, the Perisso- dactyls, are the tapirs, the horses and the rhinoceroses. The tapirs are recognisable at once by their project- ing snouts, owing to which they have been described as ‘pigs with short trunks.” They have three toes on the hind feet, and four on the front ; but one of these, the fifth in number, hardly touches the ground. As in all the other modern representatives of the sub- order, there is no trace in either foot of the first digit answering to our thumb and great toe. The tapirs WILD HORSES 159 are the descendants of an old family once distributed nearly all over the world, but now restricted to four species in America, south of Mexico, and one in Malaysia, a species having become extinct in China during comparatively recent times. The Malayan tapir has a white back; all the rest are black when fully grown, but striped white and yellow in early youth. They all live in swamps and along the forest-clad river banks, and swim and dive, and are as much at home in the water as on land. The horses now walk on their middle fingers and toes, all that is left of the third and fourth digits being represented by the splint bones; but their ancestors have been discovered, in which, going farther and farther into the past, the changes of the foot can be traced right back to the five-fingered form with which all the ungulates started. With the horses, the asses and the zebras are included, all of them being assigned to the genus Eguus. The horse itself, Eguas caballus, is like the camel in having so remote a history as a domesticated animal that it is almost impossible to prove that any really wild races exist. At the same time there are so-called wild horses, just as there are so-called wild camels; and the variety with the best claim to the honour would seem to be the tarpan of Central Asia, which some consider to be the direct descendants of the old wild horses of Europe from which neolithic man secured the first specimens for domestication ; but Prejevalski, who discovered the wild camels of Central Asia, also discovered a hitherto unknown kind of horse which has been assigned by some people to a species of its AN Sd a ee nly == 3 = — SKELETON OF THE HORSE THE ZEBRA 161 own, E. Prejevalskiz, although Sir William F lower, our greatest authority on such matters, has dismissed the untamed Prejevalskian as being merely a cross between a tarpan and a wild ass. One of the curious things in early equine history is that there were horses in South America long before its discovery by the Spaniards, but that these horses had died out, and that the wild horses of the pampas are descended, not from them, but from individuals introduced from Spain in the sixteenth century ; just as the Australian wild horses are descended from escapes originally intro- duced from England. The stripes that occasionally show in a horse’s coat are the marks of his ancestry; his more distinctly striped living relatives are referred to several species. If you see a horse-like animal striped all over down to his hoofs and even beyond the root of his tail, you will know that it is a zebra ; if the black stripes are broad and bold, and there are long transverse stripes on the haunches, it is the original zebra, EZ. zebra; but if the stripes are narrow and numerous, and extend a long way along the barrel, so that the haunch stripes are very short, it is Grévy’s zebra, Z. Grevit ; if the stripes do not extend on to the posterior, it is Chapman’s zebra, E. Chap- mand ; if they do not extend below the body line, it is Burchell’s zebra, E. Burchelld ; if it is striped only on the head and shoulders, it is a quagga, £. guagea. The asses have a stripe down the back, and some of them have a shoulder stripe, with cr without stripes on the legs ; but the variations are so great as not to be distinctive. There are only two species of wild L ‘162 MAMMALS ass, the Asiatic one, 2. hemzonus, with short ears, and the African one, &. asznus, with long ears, both of them very handsome animals, and far better-looking than ‘the wild fiery mustang of the prairies, or ‘the noble tarpan of the Asian wilds. The ordinary donkey is a domesticated African ass, and the occasional stripes on its legs are ancestral, just as are the occasional stripes on the horse. All these animals, it may be as well to note, are very short in the humerus and femur, so that their elbows and knees are close up to the body. What is generally called the horse’s knee is really his wrist, and his hock is his heel. The species of rhinoceros were formerly very numerous and widely distributed over the Old World and the New. There were rhinoceroses even in the Thames Valley and on what is now the- coast of Norfolk. Nowadays they are found only in Africa and Southern Asia and Malaysia; and these are rapidly disappearing, for the rhinoceros is a big, conspicuous brute, much less terrible than he looks, and easily shot ; his ‘armour’ being penetrable even with a pocket-knife when he is alive, although har- dening till it is nearly bullet-proof when stripped and dried. In Asia there are three species, R/znoceros unicornts, the Indian single-horned one, R. sondazcus, the smaller single-horned one found from Bengal to Borneo, and the Sumatran, A. sumatrensts, which has two horns and is found at intervals from Burma to Borneo. In Africa there are also three species, all with two horns. One of these is the white or square- mouthed rhinoceros, 2. szmus, now nearly extinct. VE ie y Kh ue Aa ‘i Dele i‘ \\ ml AN as Ai uy INDIAN RHINOCEROS / 164 MAMMALS According to Mr. F. C. Selous, ‘Twenty years ago this animal seems to have been very plentiful in the western half of South Africa; now, unless it is still to be found between the Okavango and Cunene rivers, it must almost be extinct in that portion of the country. And this is not to be wondered at when one reads the accounts in Andersson’s and Chapman’s books of their shooting as many as eight of these animals in one night as they were drinking at a small water-hole ; for it must be remembered that these isolated water-holes at the end of the dry season represented all the water to be found over an enormous extent of country, and that therefore all the rhinocer- oses that in happier times were distributed over many hundreds of square miles were in times of drought dependent upon perhaps a-single pool for their supply ‘of water. In 1877, during several months’ hunting in the country to the south of Linyanti on the river Chobi, I only saw the spoor of two square-mouthed rhinoceroses, though in 1874 I had found them fairly plentiful in the same district ; whilst in 1879, during eight months spent in hunting on and between the Botletli, Mababe, Machabe, Sunta, and Upper Chobi rivers, I never even saw the spoor of one of these animals, and all the Bushmen I met with said they were finished,’ But a few are probably still living in Mashona- land, and last year two were shot by Mr. Coryn- don, one of which is at South Kensington and the other at Tring. The common African rhinoceros is the black one with the prehensile lip, R. dzcornzs, in which the horns will sometimes reach forty inches, THE RHINOCEROS 165 the back horn being often longer than the front one. Exceptionally this species may have three horns. It is purely a vegetarian, and browses on the leaves and twigs and even the roots of certain bushes; and according to Mr. Selous it thrives in districts devoid of grass, whereas the square-mouthed species could not live in the hili country, owing to the pasturage being insufficient. Clumsy as the animal may look, the speed at which he can move is considerable, and quite equal, for a time at least, to that of the average horse. Among the Hamran Arabs he is chased on horseback and ham- strung, and a very exciting sport it iss These extra- ordinary Nimrods hunt and kill wild animals of every sort, from the antelope to the elephant, with no other weapon than the sword, and defend themselves with oval and circular shields of rhinoceros hide or the almost equally tough skin of the giraffe. The average sword of these hunters is a yard long, and has a five and a half inch hilt, and a blade nearly two inches across, almost as sharp'as a razor. With no knowledge of swordsmanship they never parry with the blade, but trust entirely to the shield, and content themselves with slashing either at their adversary or at the animal he rides. ‘One good cut, says Sir Samuel Baker, ‘delivered by a powerful arm would sever a man at the waist like a carrot.’ And then he describes a rhinoceros hunt. ‘The two. rhinoceros were running neck-and-neck like a pair of horses in harness, but bounding along at tremendous speed within ten yards of the leading Hamran. This was Taher Sheriff, who, with his sword drawn, and his long 166 MAMMALS »° hair flying wildly behind him, urged his horse forward in the race, amidst a cloud of dust raised by the two huge but active beasts, that tried every sinew of the horses. Roder Sheriff, with the withered arm, was second ; with the reins hung upon the hawk-like-claw that was all that remained of a hand, but with his naked sword grasped in his right, he kept close to his brother, ready to second his blow. Abou Do was third, his hair flying in the wind, his heels dashing against the flanks of his horse, to which he shouted in his excitement to urge him to the front, while he leant forward with his long sword in the wild energy of the moment, as though hoping to reach the game against all possibility. I soon found myself in the ruck of men, horses, and drawn swords. There were seven of us,and passing Abou Do, whose face wore an expres- sion of agony at finding that his horse was failing, I quickly obtained a place among the brothers. The horses were pressed to the utmost, but we had already run about two miles, and the game showed no signs of giving in. On they flew—sometimes over open ground, then through low bush, which tired the horses severely ; then through strips of open forest, until at length the party began to tail off and only a select few kept their places. Only four of the seven remained, and we swept down an incline, Taher Sheriff still leading and Abou Do the last! His horse was done, but not the rider ; for, springing to the ground while at full speed, sword in hand, he forsook his tired horse, and, preferring his own legs, he ran like an antelope for the first hundred yards. I thought he would really pass us and win the honour of the first blow, A RHINOCEROS. HUNT 167 It was of no use: the pace was too severe, and although running wonderfully, he was obliged to give way to the horses. Only three now followed the rhinoceros—Taher Sheriff, his brother Roder, and myself. I had been obliged to give the second place to Roder, as he was a mere monkey in weight, but I was a close third. The excitement was intense. We neared the jungle, and the rhinoceros began to show signs of flagging, as the dirt puffed up before their nostrils, and with noses close to the ground, they snorted, as they still. galloped on. Oh for a fresh horse! We were within two hundred yards of the jungle, but the horses were all done. Roder pushed ahead. We were close upon the dense thorns, and the rhinoceros broke into a trot ; they weredone! Away he went; he was close to the very heels of the beasts, but his horse could do no more than his present pace. Still he gained upon the nearest ; he leaned forward with his sword raised for the blow—another moment and the jungle would be reached! One effort more, and the sword flashed in the sunshine as the rearmost rhinoceros disappeared in the thick screen of thorns with a gash about a foot long upon his hind-quarters !’ The fourth sub-order of the ungulates is that containing the hyraces, and known in consequence as the Hyracoidea. These are allied in structure to both the rhinoceros and the elephant, but in size are not much larger than a rabbit. There are over a dozen species of them, some living among rocks, most of them in trees, nearly all of them African, ranging down to Cape Colony, one of them being found in Arabia and Syria. Their feet are very 168 MAMMALS much like those of a rhinoceros or a tapir, and they have four toes in front and three behind, with fleshy pads to the soles, which enable them to cling to smooth stones and smooth tree trunks. The inside toe of each hind foot bears a claw. THE HYRAX, OR CONEY Their incisor teeth are not chisel-edged like those of the rodents, but triangularly pointed. They are not unlike rodents in their habits, and according to Canon Tristram they make a nest of dried grass and fur, in which the young are buried like those of a mouse. The sub-order Proboscidea is now represented by ELEPHANTS 169 only one genus with two species, but in the past it was of considerable importance, most of the animals in- cluded in it being gigantic, most but not all, for one of the forms was the dwarf elephant of Malta, which was not much more than a couple of feet high, con- siderably less, in fact, than the local mouse. Thetwo species are the Indian elephant and the African elephant ; the first is now almost entirely a domesti- cated animal, the other is only domesticated in menageries, for the African natives appear to have made no attempt to utilise its powers for the service ofman. The Indian elephant has moderate-sized ears ; those of the African elephant are enormous. The molars of the Indian elephant have their enamel in parallel folds; those of the African elephant have their enamel folds in the shape of elongated diamonds. The trunk of the Indian elephant has a long upper lobe ; the trunk of an African elephant has two lobes of equal size. The Indian elephant has four or five nails on the hind foot; the African has never more than three nails on the hind foot ; and the African elephant is larger than the Indian one. The Indian elephant is a much more intelligent animal than the other, but there is no doubt that its intelli- gence has been overrated. Like the camel, he has been thought the most of by those who knew him least. In Indian literature he is never noticed for his intelligence ; the animals that come in for praise on that account are the monkey, the fox, and the crow. At the same time it would be folly to deny that the elephant has considerable mental power, considering the small size of his brain. We may not believe the 170 MAMMALS wonderful story of Pliny that an elephant chastised for carelessness in dancing was known to practise its steps alone in the moonlight, or modern showmen’s versions of a similar desire to please, but there can be no doubt that he has occasionally shown a power of initiative that may not have been thought, but was certainly the next thing to it. ‘Elephants are con- spicuously social, it has been observed ; ‘the herds are usually family parties, the mothers and young go in front, the males bring up the rear, the reason being that the young can walk within a few hours of their birth, and the pace of the herd must be that of its youngest and weakest member. When a herd takes to the water—and elephants will on occasion swim for six hours at a stretch—some of the young ones are held up with the trunks of the mothers, while others find a safer position on their mothers’ backs. To a certain extent they have a language of their own. Elephants make use of a great variety of sounds in communicating with each other, and in expressing their wants and feelings. Some are uttered by the trunk, some by the throat. ‘An elephant, says Mr. G. P. Sanderson, ‘rushing upon an assailant trumpets shrilly with fury, but if enraged by wounds or other causes, and brooding by itself, it expresses its anger by a continued hoarse grumbling from the throat. Fear is similarly expressed in a shrilly brassy trumpet, or by a roar from the lungs. Pleasure by a continued low squeaking through the trunk, or an almost in- audible purring sound from the throat. Want—as a calf calling its mother—is chiefly expressed by the throat. A peculiar sound is made use of by elephants ELEPHANT HABITS I7I to express dislike or apprehension, and at the same time to intimidate, as when the cause of some alarm has not been ascertained, and the animals wish to deter an intruder. It is produced by rapping the end of the trunk smartly on the ground, a current of air, hitherto retained, being sharply emitted through the trunk, as from a valve, at the moment of impact. The sound made resembles that of a large sheet of tin rapidly doubled. It has been erroneously ascribed by some writers to the animals beating their sides with their trunks.’ In captivity they are singularly docile, but the pursuit of the wild elephant is a most dangerous undertaking. ‘ The wild elephant’s attack,’ says Mr. Sanderson, ‘is one of the noblest sights of the chase. A grander animated object in full charge can hardly be imagined. The cocked ears and broad forehead present an immense frontage; the head is held high, with the trunk curled between the tusks, to be un- coiled in the moment of attack ; the massive fore-legs come down with the force and regularity of ponderous machinery ; and the whole figure is rapidly fore- shortened, and appears to double in size with each advancing stride. The trunk being curled and unable toemit any sound, the attack is made in silence, after the usual premonitory shriek, which adds to its impressive- ness, A tiger’s charge is an undignified display of arms, legs, and spluttering ; the bison rushes blunderingly upon his foe; the bear’s attack is despicable ; but the wild elephant’s onslaught is as dignified as it seems overwhelming—and a large tusker’s charge, when he has had sufficient distance to get into full swing, can 172 MAMMALS only be compared to the steady and rapid advance of an engine on a line of rail.’ According to Darwin, the elephant is reckoned the slowest breeder of all known animals. He says: ‘I have taken some pains to know its probable minimum rate of natural increase ; it will be under the mark to assume that it begins breeding when thirty years old, and goes on breeding till ninety years old, bringing forth three pair of young in this interval ; if this be so, at the end of the fifth century there would be alive fifteen million elephants, descended from the first pair. But the ivory-hunter and the sportsman are doing their best to render any increase at all impos- sible, and the African elephant is fast on the road to extinction. We have even recently an instance of one hunter killing seven elephants in five minutes. But Mr. Henry Bailey may as well tell the story for him- self. ‘The chief, he says, ‘pointed out an elephant resting against a tree close to the river. His colour so much. resembled that of the tree, and he was so immovable that for some time I could not make him out, until at length I spotted his great ear flapping backwards and forwards. Perceiving that it was a very unfavourable place for getting at them, I retired, crossed the river, and took up a position above them on the steep bank. At this spot I was within twenty yards of them, and could see all their heads and backs plainly. Selecting the bull with the largest tusks, 1 dropped him by a shot above the eye. Seeing him fall, the others ran down stream, but came back on hearing the carriers, who were collected there talking. AN ELEPHANT HUNT 173 They stopped by the dead elephant, when, witha right and left shot, I settled two more. The remainder only went a few yards and then stood still, not know- ing which way to go on account of the noise made by the boys. The last cartridge of the 12-bore dropped another. Taking the Martini I killed three more, at the cost of five cartridges, before the remaining four broke away across the country. This was the quickest and most successful bit of shooting I ever got in Africa. I do not think it lasted five minutes. All the elephants dropped with a single bullet, when hit fairly in the forehead, the Martini having more pene- tration than the 12-bore: In the case of those shot in the side of the head, the bullet did not penetrate to the brain, so after falling they got up again, requiring a second to finish them.’ STRENIA.—This is the mermaid order, the fact of the females rising breast-high out of the sea to suckle their young having originated the well-known legend. The order nowadays is of little importance, but it is of great interest, and was much more exten- sive in the past. Owing to the absence of the hind limbs it was once included with Cetacea, which it resembles in very few other respects. The sirenians are vegetarians and feed on seaweeds, but are rarely found in the open sea. They have smallish, rounded heads, horny palates, fleshy bristly lips—the upper one prehensile —and large nostrils. Like the cetaceans, they have no pisiform bone in the wrist, but, unlike them, some have traces of nails on their fingers. None of them have a back-fin, and some of them 174 MAMMALS havea complete set of teeth, while all the living repre- sentatives have mill-teeth. One genus, Manatus, comprising the manatis, is noteworthy from its three species having only six vertebre in the neck instead of seven. This is the genus with the rudimentary finger-nails. Another point in which it differs from the only other living genus is in its having a rounded tail instead of a deeply notched one. The manatis are found in the rivers flowing into the Atlantic on both the eastern and western tropical shores, such as the Amazon and Orinoco, the Niger and Senegal. They are about eight feet long, and very awkward and sluggish in their movements. Like the dugongs, they not only use their flippers for holding up their young in the water, but for putting food into their mouth. The dugongs belong to the other genus of the order, ffalicore, of which there are also three species, and they haunt the shores of the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and the coasts of Australia. Unlike the manatis, they do not ascend the rivers, but graze at the sea bottom in shallow water. It may be worth a note that, according to Riippell, the Israelites were directed to veil the tabernacle, not with badger-skins, as our translation has it, but with skins of the Red Sea dugong, One of the Sirenians has recently gone the way of the dodo and the great auk. In 1741, Bering, the Danish discoverer of the straits that bear his Russianised name, was shipwrecked on Copper Island in those regions, and there discovered the Northern Sea cow, Rhytina Stellert, so called after Steller, the natu- SLOTHS 175 ralist who was with him. This sea-cow was like a gigantic manati, and occasionally attained a length of thirty feet. It had no teeth, but the horny plates in its palate were enormously developed. The discovery was much appreciated by the sailors, who took quite a fancy to sea-cow meat, so much so that in less than half a century the species became extinct. When Nordenskjold came home from the Vega expedition, during which he accomplished the north-east passage along the northern shores of Asia, he brought home with him a large number of skeletons of Steller’s sea- cow. In some of the fossil sirenians, all of which were of Tertiary age, there were rudimentary legs. Some of these early forms have been found in England and some in Jamaica, and they are especially valuable in indicating the derivation of the Sirenia from the land mammals. EDENTATA.—This is another order on the down-grade, containing several very different groups once very numerous and connected by intermediate forms now only found in a fossil state. It is charac- terised by a general incompleteness of dentition, some of its representatives having no teeth at all. It is usually considered as being made up of seven families. To the first of these, the Bradypodide, the ‘slow- footed’ animals, belong the sloths, one group of which has three toes, and nine vertebre in the neck, the other having two toes and only six vertebra in the neck. Both groups are confined to Central and South America, and spend their life among the trees, feeding on leaves and fruits, and so leisurely in their 176 MAMMALS movements that green alge grow on their hair. They have enormous claws like hooks, and simply hang on all their lives moving from tree to tree when the branches interlock. The Megatheriide, ‘great \ Aw ORY NM. Pe Ve aS 4 hy THE GREAT ANT-EATER wild beasts,’ were huge sloths, now extinct, which lived on the ground, and pulled the branches down to feed on. In structure they fill the gap between the sloths and the ant-eaters. The ant-eaters are also ANT-EATERS V7 South American. The little one lives in trees ; the large one, over seven feet long, lives on the ground, tearing up the ant-hills with his powerful claws, and licking up the ants with his long worm-like tongue, The great ant-eater, or ant-bear as it is sometimes called, is POrencive enough to man until attacked, but a fight with it becomes a serious matter if at close quarters. Mr. C. B, Brown has a story of a Guianan Indian who met his, death in one of these encounters. ‘In returning home, considerably in advance of the rest of his party, it is supposed that he saw a young ant-eater, and was carrying it home, when its mother gave chase, overtook and killed him; for, when his companions came up, they found him ine dead on his face in the embrace of the ant-bear, one of its large claws having entered his heart. In the struggle he had managed to stick his knife behind his back into the animal, which bled to death, but not before the poor Fallon had succumbed to its terrible hug. So firmly had the ant-eater grappled him, that to separate it from the corpse the Indians had to cut off its fore-legs,’ Another family of edentates is that of the arma- dillos, who have, however, a set of simple teeth. These also are South Americans. They are heavily armoured with overlapping plates, some of them being able to roll themselves up into a ball in times of danger, the head and tail fitting into notches in the shield: They are all burrowers, and feed on anything they can get, either vegetable or animal, dead or alive. They are near akin to the glyptodonts, whose remains, of com- M 178 MAMMALS paratively recent age, are found in Texas and further south, in Mexico and South America. These animals were clad in a complete solid suit of armour of enor- mous strength, which would seem to have preserved them from the attacks of everything but starvation. ‘Why, says Mr. Kitchen Parker, ‘such a form as the glyptodon should have failed to keep his ground is a great mystery ; Nature seems to have built him, as Rome was built, for eternity.’ The pangolins, or manidz, represent the armour-clads in the Old World. These also are burrowers, but some are tree-climbers. They have overlapping horny scales and enormous claws. ‘One of my friends, when in India,’ says the Rev. J. G. Wood, ‘kept a pangolin for some time, but found that it was endangering the safety of the house by incessant burrowing. So, as he wished to keep the skin, he determined to kill it himself. He there- fore shot it with his Colt’s revolver. Instead of penetrating the skin, the ball only knocked the animal over, when it curled itself up into a ball, just like the hedgehog, but was not even wounded. He fired a second shot at it, and the ball recoiled upon himself and bruised him. At last he was obliged to insert the point of a dagger under the scales, and drive it through the skin with a mallet. He after- wards presented me with the skin and dagger. The mark of both balls was perceptible on the scales, but not one of them was even cracked.’ The seventh family of the edentates is that of the aard-varks. Theseare the only ant-eaters with teeth. They have tubular mouths, pig-like snouts, and long MARSUPIALIA 179 sticky tongues. They are found in South Africa, in Nubia, and on the West Coast of Africa ; and are nocturnal animals that live in burrows. Aard-vark is simply the Dutch for earth-pig. MARS UPIALIA.—Theseanimalsdifferso widely from any of the foregoing that they are now grouped into a separate sub-class, there being three sub-classes altogether—the Eutheria with which we have been dealing, the Metatheria, containing these marsupials, and the Prototheria, comprising the monotremes, with which this chapter will end. In the eutheria the brain is convoluted, in the other sub-classes it is nearly smooth; and while in the eutheria we find the temperature of the body ranging from 95° to 104° Fahrenheit, in the metatheria the range is from go° to 97°, and in the prototheria it is from VijmmtOnoser The great distinction is, however, in the manner of birth. The marsupials are, as their name signifies, ‘the pouched animals,’ the young after birth being generally nursed in a pouch for some considerable time. The monotremes lay eggs in strong flexible white shells, out of which the young have to find their way into the world. The skeleton of a marsu- pial can be recognised at once, for, with one exception, —there is always an exception in any attempt at classifying—it has a pair of long slender bones close to where the pouch comes. One family of marsupials is American, the others are only found in Australia and the neighbouring islands. It is usual to divide the order into two groups, the first, Polyprotodontia, such as the Tasma- M 2 180 MAMMALS nian wolf, having large canine teeth and small and numerous incisors ; the second, Dzprotodontza, such as the kangaroo, having small canines and large and few incisors, and generally having three incisors in the upper jaw and one only in the lower ; but there is one family, the bandicoots, which is intermediate in its characteristics. There are two American genera, one Chzronectes, being represented by the yapock, a curious aquatic carnivore about as big as a rat and having webbed feet, living in the rivers of Guatemala and Brazil ; the other, Dzde/phys, containing over twenty species of opossums, ranging all the way from Virginia to Patagonia. Opossums have fifty teeth, eighteen of which are incisors, ten of them being in the upper jaw. Another common characteristic is the long prehensile, and to a certain extent scaly, tail. The ‘pouch’ is not often complete, and in most cases is absent altogether. The opossums that have no pouches carry their young on their back, the little ones hanging on by their tails to their mother’s tail. One species has itshome among swamps and livesupon the crabs it catches. In the past there were opos- sums in England and France. To the Dasyuride belong the Tasmanian wolf, which looks like a striped dog, and is now nearly extinct, and the dasyures, which are also carnivorous, though more like cats. To this family also belong the marsupial mice, or phascogales, and Myrmecobius fasciatus, the marsupial ant-eater, which has more teeth than any other animal of its class and is one of the few mammals marked with cross bars, Among the WOMBATS 181 bandicoots, Paramelid@, are the so-called marsupial rat and marsupial rabbit. The three families that are left belong to the group with the large incisors, and include the genera that agree more with the popular notion as to what a marsupial should look like. These are the wombats, of which there are three species, clumsy, marmot-like OPOSSUM WITH ITS YOUNG animals, with long claws and only an apology for a tail, the phalangers, or Australian opossums, and the kangaroos. The phalangers—the colonial name of opossum is now by general consent discouraged— vary much in habits; they are found not only in Australia, but in New Guinea and the neighbouring islands, and some of them have an extension of 182 MAMMALS membrane from the little finger to the ankle which enables them to glide from tree to tree in the manner of the flying squirrels. Some of the New Guinea species are very tiny creatures ; some are as large as cats. ‘I found,’ says Mr. Gill, “ three charming little passengers on board, brought off for sale by natives, of Aroma—a light grey Belideus ariel and her two little ones. The latter were cosily wrapped up in cotton wool in a cocoanut shell. The mother, in her terror, climbed the rigging, and made a nest aloft, coming down at dusk to feed and tend her offspring. These beautiful little animals died a few days afterwards at Port Moresby. The Belideus ariel is exactly like a male flying squirrel in appearance.’ One of the Australian species is no larger than a mouse, and, of course, has been claimed as the marsupial bat. To the same family as the phalangers belongs Phascol- arctos cinereus, which some have called the marsupial bear and others the marsupial monkey ; it is much more like a bear than a monkey, but neither term is appropriate, and it is now only known to naturalists as the koala. The kangaroos, Macropodide, were tremendous fellows in the past, but the largest now is about as big as a man, while the smaller is no larger than a rabbit. Most of the kangaroos live on the plains, but there is one, a Petrogale, which lives among rocks ; and others, belonging to the genus Dendrolagus, which live up among the trees, and consequently have shorter legs than the rest. The kangaroo’s foot is remarkable for the large size of the fourth toe, the first toe is absent, the second and third are so weak KANGAROOS 183 as to be useless, and the fifth is not so large as the fourth, all the four being bound together with skin This one powerful toe is armed with a powerful claw, with which dogs have been ripped up and killed at a single kick. Thekangaroo is by no means a helpless creature. He will catch a dog up in his fore-paws, leap off with it to a neighbouring river, and then hold hanes i See : eS WH gare Ketel aa Sua KANGAROOS it under water until it is drowned. Some kangaroos invariably make straight for water when pursued. ‘If, says Houssay, ‘he reaches it he enters, and, thanks to his great height, he is able to go on foot to a depth where the dogs are obliged to swim. Arrived there, he plants himself on his two hind legs and his tail, and, up to his shoulders in the water, awaits the 184 MAMMALS -atrival of the pack. With his fore-paws he seizes by the head the first dog that approaches him, and as he is more firmly balanced than his assailant, he holds the dog’s nose beneath the water as long as he can. Unless a second dog comes speedily to the rescue the first is inevitably drowned. If a companion arrives to rescue him, he is so confused by this unexpected bath that he regains the bank as quickly as possible, and has no further desire to attack. A strong and courageous old male can thus hold his own against twenty or thirty dogs, drowning some and frightening others, and the hunter is obliged to intervene and put an end to this energetic defence by a bullet.’ Kan- garoos have even been known to kill men by drown- ing them. There are about two dozen species of kangaroos ; the big ones, like Macropus giganteus and M. rufus, are over eight feet in length, counting in the tail, and can jumpa fence eleven feet high and leap fifteen feet on the flat. The tail is not used to spring with from the ground. No kangaroo, unless by accident on uneven ground, touches anything with his tail when going fast. His taii merely acts as a balance when he is on the move, and is carried horizontally. MONOTREMATA.—This is the last order of mammals; and they are mammals without mamma, the mother’s milk exuding from groups of pores in the skin. In many respects they resemble reptiles, in some they resemble birds, but really they have points of resemblance with every creature present and past, and seem to be built up of missing links and ‘ suidnosod & ox] yeoo B pue Joyea-jUe UL Ox] NOUS B sey vUpIyo oy, “feos oy} UT ysoysTY ot} Aysnoraqo + Suroq seupryos ayy ‘seuplyoe oy} pue ‘gjowyonp oq} ‘snypuhysoys2usc) “eIQUES oI} O1e 2194 L, (S[PISTISOA , SQL. . FIONMONG FHL THE DUCKMOLE 186 MAMMALS the duckmole has a beak like a duck; a coat like a mole, a tail like a beaver, and sleeps rolled up like a hedgehog. Their skulls are smooth and thin, and coalesce, as is the case among the birds. They both lay eggs, but the echidna hatches them in its pouch, while the duckmole hatches them in a burrow. Both have teeth to begin with—flat, saucer-like things—but they wear them out at an early age and develop horny plates in their stead. There are three species of echidna, all of which have five claws on each foot; and in New Guinea is an allied form, Proechidna, which is larger and has only three claws to each foot. One species of echidna, F. Laweszz, is confined to New Guinea, the other two range through Australia to Tasmania. Lawes’s echidna, says Mr. Gill, ‘is distinguished from the Australian species by having spines on the head instead of hair, and by the rostrum or snout being more elongated. In the north-western species the snout is about three times the length of the head. The echidna has no teeth, feeding on ants and other insects, which it deposits in its mouth by means of a long extensile tongue. Being a burrowing mammal, it is furnished with limbs and curved claws of great strength. The rapidity with which it disappears in sandy ground is almost magical ’—the rapidity being chiefly due to the peculiar position of the hind foot, which is turned outwards and backwards, so that the animal practically walks on its instep. The echidnas spend their life on land, the duck- mole spends most of his in the water. He burrows like a vole, making long galleries from thirty to fifty ECHIDNAS 187 feet long, one entrance to which is below the water- level, and the other up on the ground. Here is the rough nest where the eggs are hatched, and here he sleeps during the heat of the day, coming out in the twilight to swim and dive and feed on worms and LAWES’S ECHIDNA insects and whatever he may find, stowing away all the food he can in his cheek pouches. He has no external ears, and his eyes are small, but he is quick to perceive the approach of danger, and active as an otter in the stream. He is a living fossil, the last and most doubtful of the mammalia. egy THE OSTRICH CHAPTER II BIRDS THE birds, by general consent, form the next great class of the animal kingdom, not that they are in any way inferior to the lower mammals, but that they seem to. have reached a higher stage of development than the reptiles, the amphibians, or the fishes. The birds, in fact, are almost the equals of the mammals in organisation and intelligence. ‘It is only,’ as Arthur Thomson well says, ‘because we recognise in mammals a higher degree of brain development, and a closer organic connection between mother and offspring, that we venture to place them above the birds.’ Among the mammals we have seen how the typical skeleton was modified in the cases of the seals and whales for life in the water; among the birds we have the same general plan podies to suit a life in the air. Not that all birds fly, for some of them run, but speaking generally, birds are flyers, and to them belongs the kingdom of the air. Looking at a bird’s bones individually, you will find that they are much lighter, bulk for bulk, than the bones of a mammal; looking at them when placed in their 190 BIRDS natural position, you see how changed they are in their Proportions to suit the work they have to do. Take the breastbone, for instance, and notice how the keel has appeared on it, and to what a size it has grown. Just as the ridges on a carnivore’s skull tell you of the powerful muscles that are attached to them for working the jaws, so does that keel bear witness to SKELETON OF A BIRD the strength and development of the wing muscles for flight ; and if you take a series of breastbones from different kinds of birds you will find that the bigger the keel the better the flight, until, in the case of the humming-bird, the skeleton is nearly all breast- bone and the breastbone is deeply keeled, while in that of the ostrich the keel has gone altogether and the breastbone is by no means noticeably large. BIRDS’ BREASTBONES IQI The absence or presence of this characteristic keel or ‘carina’ on the breastbone or ‘sternum’ has been adopted as the basis of what may be called the major classification of ordinary birds into Cardnate, or birds with a keel to their breastbone, and Razite, or birds with a breastbone as flat as a raft—ratis being the Latin for that rudimentary nautical invention. Taking all the birds we know of, an earlier and BREASTBONE OF OWL equally simple division can be made, for we can sort them out on their tails—by the tail meaning the real tail and not the feathers that grow on it—the birds with tails longer than their bodies being assignable to the Saurure, the birds with the shorter tails being further divisible into keeled and rafted, so far as their breastbone is concerned. These three groups, Carinate, Ratite, and Saurure, are of equal impor- tance to the orders of the mammals, and are the only 192 : BIRDS three divisions on which naturalists are agreed, the other differences between birds being really so slight, and the series of intermediate forms so involved, that almost every ornithologist has a way of his own in regard to them. These classifications mostly depend on the presence of several peculiarities in the bird, some of them PARTS OF A BIRD structural and most of them external. To assist the reader in following them, we have here a bird marked out so as to show a few of the external features of importance. Here 1 is the beak, the upper edge being the ‘ culmen,’ the lower half being the mandible ; 2 is the ‘crown, the space between it and the beak A BIRD’S LEG 193 being the ‘forehead ;’ 3 shows the ‘ear-coverts,’ or ‘auriculars,’ and 4 is the back; 5 is the ‘alula’ or bastard wing on the rudimentary thumb, and 6 shows the ‘ wing-coverts ;’ 7 shows the greater wing-coverts _and 8 the ‘tertiaries,’ 9 the ‘ primaries’ on the fingers and wrist bones, and 10 the ‘secondaries,’ on the ulna; 11 is the tail, 12 shows the upper tail coverts and 13 the under tail coverts ; 14 is the so-called tarsus, which is really the tatso-metatarsus. A BIRD’S LEG Just one more diagram, that of a bird’s leg. Here - the femur is shown at A ; the tibia is shown at B j all that remains of the other shank bone, the fibula, is shown at C just under the knee, which you can recog- nise, as you can recognise the horse’s true knee, by the way it bends outwards; but the fibula, though always imperfect, is not always as short as this, and N 194 BIRDS in some of the penguins it is as long as the tibia; at the lower end of B is the ankle, which is really on its upper portion, the tibio-tarsus ; and then comes D, representing all that is left of the tarsal bones. The toes are more readily distinguishable. The ‘hallux,’ or great toe, is the one at the back, that marked e is the ‘inner’ toe, representing the second digit in man,’ counting from between the legs outwards; the long one is the middle toe, the other the ‘outer’ toe. The fifth toe is missing in birds ; when there are but three toes it is the hallux which has gone; when there are but two toes, as with the ostrich, it is the second and third that remain. Normally, a bird has fourteen toe joints, two being in the hind toe, three in the inner toe, four in the middle toe, and five in the outer toe ; but these vary, and their variations are of some use in classification. It may perhaps assist us to point out that B is the ‘drumstick ;’ and in our diagram of the breastbone we showed, at the top, in position, the ‘merry thought, or furculum, formed of the united clavicles, next to them coming the coracoids, the coracoids and scapule forming the so-called side- bones. CARINAT4.—These are generally said to be the flying birds, but the statement must not be taken too literally, for the order includes the penguins, and such exceptional forms as the burrowing New Zealand parrot, the dodo, and the aptornis, besides the tina- mous and the hoatzin, which can hardly be called flyers. There are two main divisions at the least, first those with teeth, the Odontornithes, and second THE DIPPER 195 those without. The birds with teeth, real teeth in sockets, and not mere imitations like the-saw beak THE DIPPER of the merganser or the plates of the ducks and swans, having their chief representative in the old Ichthyornis, found’ in the cretaceous series of North N2 196 BIRDS America, with which we need trouble ourselves no further. The carinates without teeth are the great aerial army, ranging from the perchers downwards, That the passerine birds should head the army is admitted, but which of them it is not easy to decide. The birds of prey, headed by the vultures and eagles, have been deposed from their once proud position, and the most favoured candidates for the vacancy are the thrushes and warblers and the crows. Ifthe honour is given to the crows, the raven will naturally lead the van; but if we vote for the thrushes, on the strength of their all-round capabilities, we shall apparently have to decide between the nightingale and the missel-thrush, who are each strongly sup- ported. As a third candidate, if one is wanted to take off a few votes from the party nominees, we are half inclined to propose the dipper. There is nothing that birds do that he cannot do. His feathers are of the best, and yet he is the only passerine bird with down. He builds a beautiful nest. He can fly in the air, and he can fly under the water; he can run, he can walk, he can hop, he can float, he can swim, he can wade, he can dive, he can walk under water, he can sing, and he can fight. And he is a good-looking fellow into the bargain, with quite an artistic feeling for a lovely home’ beside the rippling and falling water. But as it is really of no consequence which we begin with, let us follow one of the ordinary tracks, contenting ourselves with an example here and there. Once upon a time Daines Barrington and Patrick SINGING BIRDS 197 Syme stood in judgment over thirty and more leading song-birds. They treated them as a modern ex- ‘aminer would so many candidates, giving them THE NIGHTINGALE marks; twenty each was the highest possible, for mellowness, sprightliness, plaintiveness, compass, and execution ; five subjects making up a hundred marks. No bird got a twenty, the highest score was made by ‘198 BIRDS the nightingale, who got nineteen for everything but sprightliness ; in that particular he only got fourteen, being easily beaten by the skylark, the goldfinch, and the canary ; in mellowness he was equalled: by the blackcap, in plaintiveness by the solitary thrush, which was perhaps the ring-ouzel, in compass by the canary, and in execution also by the canary. Second THE BLACKCAP on the list to him in total number of marks was the linnet, the canary coming third and the blackcap fourth. Absurd as the proceeding may appear, the result curiously confirmed the popular verdict. Everywhere the chief song-birds are found among the thrush and nightingale group, and everywhere the THE REED WARBLER 2CO BIRDS nightingale is supreme. But some there are who, not having heard the nightingale, have singers, they think, as sweet, say among the mocking-birds of the Rocky Mountains, also belonging to the thrush group. Let us hear Theodore Roosevelt on this-matter. ‘On the evening in question the moon was full. My host kindly assigned me a room of which the windows opened on a great magnolia tree, where, I was told, a mocking-bird sang every night and all night long. I went to my room about ten. The moonlight was shining in at the open window, and the mocking-bird was already in the magnolia. The great tree was bathed in a flood of shining silver; I could see each twig and mark every action of the singer, who was pouring forth such a rapture of ringing melody as I ‘have never listened to before or since. Sometimes he would perch motionless for many minutes, his body quivering and thrilling with the outpour of music. Then he would drop softly from twig to twig, until the lowest limb was reached, when he would rise, fluttering and leaping through the branches, his song never ceasing for an instant until he reached the summit of the tree and launched into the warm scent- laden air, floating in spirals with outspread wings, until, as if spent, he sank gently back into the tree and down through the branches, while his song rose into an ecstasy of ardour and passion. His voice rang like a clarionet in rich full tones, and his exe- cution covered the widest possible compass; theme followed theme, a torrent of music, a swelling tide of harmony in which scarcely any two bars were alike. I stayed till midnight listening to him; he was THE PASSERINES 201 singing when I went to sleep; he was still singing when I woke two hours later; he sang through the livelong night.’ That is about the best that has yet been done for the American favourite ; it is as good in its way as George Meredith’s skylark effort :—-- He rises and begins to round, He drops the silver chain of sound Of many links without a break, In chirrup, whistle, slur, and shake, All intervolved and spreading wide, Like water-dimples down a tide Where ripple ripple overcurls . And eddy into eddy whirls ; A press of hurried notes that run So fleet they scarce are more than one, Yet changingly the thrills repeat And linger ringing while they fleet. There are some six thousand passerines alone. In the Thrush family are the blackbird, the bower birds, the wheatears, the chats, the robin, and all the warblers and many of the so-called wrens, though not the real one; close to them come the Czucline, including the dippers, and then the tits. The wren, Troglodytes, is near at hand, with the shy nuthatch and the cheery wagtails. The shrikes and the waxwings can be taken next as leading on to the swallows and martins ; and hereabouts room must be found for the creepers and multitudinous finches, including the grosbeaks, the whidaws, and the weavers, buntings, and plant-cutters. To another closely allied group belong the starlings and then the crows, including the 202 BIRDS raven, the rook, the magpie, the chough, the jay and nutcracker, and then their near relatives, most beau- tiful of all birds, the Paradiseidze of New Guinea and its neighbourhood. Beautiful as they seem to us, these Birds of Paradise are far more lovely in their native wilds. Mr. Gill describes how he came upon a group of them in his Papuan wanderings. ‘One morning wethad camped on a spur of the Owen Stanley Range, and being up early, to enjoy the cool atmosphere, I saw on one of a clump of trees close by six Birds of Paradise, four cocks and two hens. The hens were sitting quietly on a branch; and the four cocks, dressed in their very best, their ruffs of green and yellow standing out, giving them a large, handsome appearance about the head and neck, their long flowing plumes so arranged that every feather seemed carefully combed out, and the long wires stretched well out behind, were dancing in a circle round them. It was an interesting sight ; first one, then another would advance a little nearer to a hen, and she, coquette-like, would retire a little, pretending not to care for any advances. A shot was fired, contrary to my expressed wich ; there was a strange commotion, and two of the cocks flew away, the others and the hens remained. Soon the two returned, and again the dance began and continued long, and, I having strictly forbidden any more shooting, all fear was gone; and so, at last, a rest, and then a little nearer to the two dark-brown and certainly not pretty hens. Quarrelling ensued, and in the end all six birds flew away.’ In this rapid survey we have mentioned the prin- SHOOTING BIRDS OF PARADISE BIRDS 204 cipal representatives of the old passerine, that 1S sparrow-like group, which in many of the classifica- SS NY Ze CLG Ww CEH WEAVER BIRD AND NEST tions is ranked as an order of the carinate division. To frame a definition of the group that will include t off distinctly from the all the exceptions and mark i THE PICARIANS 205 other groups would be a puzzling task in the limited space at our disposal. It will be enough for us in this case, as in those that follow, to point out the general arrangement of the series, merely remarking THE NIGHTJAR that ornithologists have been so prone to magnify their office that in many instances their species are given less value than the botanist’s varieties. The next group consists of the woodpecker-like birds, the picarians, in which many of the tropical representatives find their place. Here are ‘the wide- mouthed swifts and wider-mouthed nightjars, the 206 BIRDS strong-beaked woodpeckers and active kingfishers, the bee-eaters, and hoopoes, the cuckoos and motmots and hornbills and trogons and toucans and the hum- ming-birds, the very smallest of birds, whose nests are no larger than half a walnut shell, and whose flight is as the flashing of a jewel. THE SWORD-BILL HUMMING-BIRD Next in the series come the parrots and cockatoos, allof them fruit and seed eaters with the exception of the New Zealand kea, which has become carnivorous since Europeans brought sheep into the colony. Most of the parrots are brightly coloured ; they are a well-marked group, easily recognisable, of whose BIRDS OF PREY 207 intelligence and curious ways and extraordinary longevity the stories are legion. Next come the owls, of which there are some two hundred species distributed all over the globe. THE CONCAVE HORNBILL Following them are the vultures, eagles, hawks and kites and falcons, amounting to some five hundred species, most of them strong and cruel in beak and claw ; the series from the barn-owl to the osprey being often grouped as birds of prey. 208 BIRDS Clearly separable from them is the next group, comprising the pelicans, cormorants, gannets, and birds of that class, most of them having four webbed toes. Then come the herons, storks, spoonbills and ibises, between whom there is an unmistakable affinity. Then the flamingoes, which have spines round their tongue, in consequence of which they bear the name of odontoglosse. Another easily recognisable group comprises the jacanas and screamers, of whom Rymer Jones says, delightfully, ‘The surfaces of lakes and ponds in tropical countries are frequently covered with luxuriant vegetation to such a degree that they might almost be said to be carpeted with verdure too unstable to support the weight of birds of ordinary construction, and at the same time too dense to give passage to swimming water-fowl. To meet the re- quirements of such situations, which from their great extent are by no means unimportant, a numerous family has been specially constructed, able, by means of their lengthened toes, to walk over the floating leaves, and to give animation by their cries and their quarrels to regions which without such contrivance would remain silent and desolate.’ Next in the descending series comes the ordinary water-fowl of the compact family of geese, swans, ducks, and mergansers. Next to them it is now usual to place the pigeon group, including the dodo and some hundred and fifty other species, the most important to man being the blue rock, from which the domes- ticated varieties have all been derived. Next to these come the somewhat anomalous sandgrouse, followed by the game birds properly so-called, GAME BIRDS 209 including the grouse, ptarmigan, pea-fowl, phea- sants, partridges, curassows, turkeys, and the mound- building megapodes. Following these is the semi- reptilian hoatzin, and then the rails, crakes, coots, and moor-hens, leading on easily to the cranes and bustards, and so, by way of the stone-curlew, to the numerous plovers, among them the lapwing, not- withstanding the tens of thousands of its eggs that are annually collected for food. : Included in this group are the turnstone and oyster-catcher, the avocet and stilt, the phalaropes, the woodcock and snipes, the sandpipers, godwits, and curlews. A wider gap than usual marks off the square-tailed gulls and fork-tailed terns, and pirate-gulls or skuas. Following these come the pygopodes, comprising the razorbills, auks, guille- mots, puffin, divers, and grebes ; then come the petrels and then the South African tinamous, which used to be classed with the partridges, then ranged with the bustards, and are now at the foot of the carinate list, owing to their affinities with the rheas and emus. At the bottom they are likely to remain, although there will probably be a considerable changing of places among the groups above them when a definite basis of classification is at last agreed upon. The mammals, as we have seen, have been sorted out to a large extent on their dental formule and the structure of the skull. ‘Theskull and face, as Kitchen Parker said,‘ governs the whole body as it were ; every other part of the organism corresponds to what is observable there. The jaws are an index to the animal’s food, the brain-case is a guide to the animal’s intelligence.’ It would seem, therefore, as though the final classifi- oO 210 BIRDS cation of birds would be an anatomical one, in which the skull would be of the first importance. Huxley classified the Carzzat@ according to the shape of their vomer, the thin small bone standing upright in the middle of the mouth ; and this arrangement, as altered slightly by Parker,has much in its favour. Wis first division into those with the vomer broad behind and those with it narrow behind shut off the tinamous, all the rest of the carinates having vomers narrowing posteriorly. These he sorted into those with the maxillo-palatine bones united, which brought into one group the birds of prey, the parrots, cuckoos, king- fishers, hoopoes, bee-eaters, ducks, flamingoes, herons, storks and ibises, and pelicans. The rest of the birds with the maxillo-palatines free were then divisible into three groups: those with the vomerine halves distinct, as the woodpeckers ; those with the vomer pointed in front, as the plovers, gulls, penguins, auks, grebes, petrels, game-birds, and humming-birds ; and those with the vomer truncated in front, as the swifts and passerines. And these main groups were further sorted out under types. But we need dwell no further on this matter, which it was necessary to mention by way of caution that the old classifications based on every part indiscriminately—head, tail, beak, claws, legs, breastbone, wings, and feathers—are:to be considered as under revision with a view to retire- ment. A bird can fly almost as high in the air as a fish can swim-below the surface of the sea. There is one bird which has a range in the air of over three miles in vertical height. This is the condor, THE CONDOR which is the largest of the vultures. ‘Condors,’ says Mr. Whymper, ‘ were very numerous upon the lower slopes of Antisana. A score or more continually \ (| y y \ i , mi ‘ 1 Hf i iy) i THE GRIFFON VULTURE hovered over the pastures, keeping ordinarily about 1,500 feet from the ground—an elevation which they have no doubt learned by experience is sufficient for O02 212. BIRDS practical purposes. They did not dart upwards or downwards, but rose rather slowly ; and, when they had attained their usual height, maintained themselves at it by nearly imperceptible movements of the wings, and floated, balancing themselves in the air, turning to this or that side, gradually descending ; and then, by a few leisurely strokes, regained their former level, continuing to float and circle in this manner by the hour together. We did not either when upon or in the neighbourhood of the summits of Chimborazo and Antisana, or near the summits of any other mountains, see a condor in our vicinity upon a single occasion, and I think never observed one so high as 16,000 feet. I believe Humboldt to have been mistaken in sup- posing that he often saw the bird soaring above all the summits of the Andes. Anyone, however skilled in judging distances, may be deceived in such a matter. It is an undoubted fact that condors frequent the sea- shore in more southern parts of South America. Whether the same individual birds also soar to great heights, and are specifically the same as the condor of the equator, are questions that I am unable to answer. If there are no marked points of difference between them, it will be ascertained that this species has a range in altitude of about 16,000 feet (not in any one country, but spread over thirty degrees of latitude), and this is perhaps the greatest that is possessed by any bird.’ The distances birds travel are enormous. Many of our summer migrants journey to the African lakes and beyond—the little willow wren, for instance, being found as far south as Mashonaland. How they MIGRATION 213 manage to cross the wide stretches of water and come back year by year to the same hedgerow is a mystery that man as yet has vainly striven to fathom. Wallace’s theory of migration is that in past times there was a more equable climate than now, and that as the seasons became more distinct the birds had to fly further and further ; those that did not fly at the right time in the right direction would, as the necessity for migration grew more imperative, tend to disappear, and so the habit became instinctive. A bird always breeds in the coldest climate he visits, and always crosses the sea at its shallowest portion, where there once was a chain of islands. But it is really remark- able how many survive the journey, considering that the migration frequently takes place in the darkness of the night, and that many of the birds, particularly. the smaller ones, are such poor flyers under ordinary circumstances. This, of course, refers to the birds that ‘go foreign ;’ the home migration of the native birds affording but little difficulty of explanation. Birds may be migrants in one country and residents in another. There is the robin, for instance, which is a migrant in Germany ; and in such cases the northern colony is always reinforced by the visitors during the summer. Some birds visit a country twice during the year, on their way to and from the termini of their journeys; and these journeys do not extend in all cases to the equator or near it. The fieldfare, for ex- ample, finds England quite far enough south for its comfort, and returns, as a rule, to the icy north to breed. One bird, the snow bunting, has been found nesting within eight degrees of the North Pole. Some 214 BIRDS birds, like the whiskered tern, nest both north and south of the equator. A bird’s memory for localities is evidently as good as its memory for other things. As a class they are quite equal to the mammals in mental activity and alertness. In some respects they are curiously human. Like overworked schoolboys they will repeat their lessons in their dreams, the lessons taught by their parents and their companions as well as those taught by man. In another point, too, the similarity is noticeable: ‘Parrots, says Romanes, ‘not only remember, but recollect; that is to say, they know when there is a missing link in a train of association, and purposely endeavour to pick it up. Thus, for instance, the late Lady Napier told me an interesting series of observations on this point which she had made upon an intelligent parrot of her own. They were of this kind. Taking such a phrase as “Old Dan Tucker,” the bird would remember the beginning and the end, and try to recollect the middle. For it would say very slowly, “Old—old —old,” and then very quickly, “ Lucy Tucker.” Feeling that this was not right, it would try again as before, “ Old —old—old —old Bessy Tucker,” substituting one word after the other in the place of the sought-for word “ Dan.” And that the process was one of truly seeking for the ' desired word was proved by the fact that if, while the bird was saying “ Old—old—old,” anyone threw in the word “Dan,” he immediately supplied the “ Tucker.” ’ The whole range of the emotions appear to be observable amongst birds—affection, sympathy, OSTRICHES 215 jealousy, hatred, emulation, vindictiveness, curiosity, pride, and the sense of the beautiful are all exhibited by them unmistakably. The scope of their nest- building powers is notorious, and none the less won- -derful because it is known. Every condition of society seems to be represented amongst them, from the solitary dweller in the woods to the dwellers in towns, and even the dwellers in the close quarters of a flat, like the sociable grosbeaks. RATIT2.-—Here, again, we can begin by setting up two divisions, one with teeth and one without. This time the toothed brigade are represented by the Odontolce, the type of whom is Hesperornzs, the swimming ostrich of cretaceous days, who had a tail with a dozen vertebre, and rejoiced in a long array of pointed reptilian teeth set in slender jaws which were united, as in the snakes, only by cartilage, so that its swallowing powers were equal to any emer- gency. With the note that he had four toes, all directed forwards, we can leave his brigade for the toothless ones. Of these there are five groups—the kiwis, the moas, the cassowaries, the rheas, and the ostriches. Of these, the first three have hardly any humerus, while the other two have rather a long one. The kiwis, too, have a big toe, while the moas and casso- waries, including, of course, the emus, have not. The ostriches have but two toes; the rheas have three. An interesting survival in the rhea is that of a claw on three of the fingers, thus indicating the origin of wings from prehensile fore-limbs. 216 BIRDS There are two species of ostrich, both of them African. The ostrich is the largest existing bird— sometimes he may be eight feet high; but the New Zealand moas, extinct but recently, exceeded ten feet in height, and the eggs of another of the group—the Madagascar zepyornis—held six times as much as those of the ostrich, though the height of the mature birds need not necessarily have been in the same ratio. Of the rheas there are three species, all South American, and all, like the ostriches, wonderfully good runners. The ostrich roars like a lion ; the rhea is said to sing, for it-alone among the Ratte has a syrinx in its throat, like the carinates.. Of the casso- waries there are eight species, distributed over New Guinea, the north of Australia, Ceram, and the islands to the eastward. They are recognisable at once by their horny helmets and the spines on their wings, as well as by the long claw on the inner toe, with which they fight. The emus have claws of nearly equal length on all three toes, They are, however, more easily distinguished from the casso- waries by the absence of the neck wattles and of the horny helmet. There are two species of emu, Dromeus, both Australian, both very shy and speedy, and both with hardly any wing to speak of. Lowest of all of this group we have the kiwi, the Apteryx (that is, the wingless one), a New Zealander, about a couple of feet high, with an enormous egg for his size. There are four species, the biggest being A. maximus, all of them nocturnal, feeding chiefly on the earthworm, drawing it forth with its long bill THE OLDEST BIRD 217 carefully and deliberately, ‘coaxing it out, as it were, as Sir W. L. Buller says, ‘by degrees instead of pulling roughly or breaking it, and on getting it fairly out of the ground, throwing up his head with a jerk and swallowing the worm ata gulp. A quaint THE KIWI old-time creature is the kiwi, with no wings, no tail, and its feathers mere bristles. SAURUR4.—The birds of this group, the last of the avian orders, the one distinguished from all the rest by the long reptilian tails, are all extinct. No toothless representatives have yet been discovered. The oldest known is the Bavarian Archeopteryx of 218 BIRDS the Upper Oolite age; and belonging to the same _ age, and very similar in many respects, was the American Laopteryx. The archeopteryx was as big as a rook, with a long lizard-like tail of twenty separate vertebra, all distinct from one another, and all carrying a pair of feathers, one on each side; in fact, if the tail could have been suddenly shut up in telescopic fashion, it would have appeared like a forty-feathered one of the usual fan shape. The archeopteryx had the claws on its wing, which we have already noticed among the rheas. 219 CHAPTER III REPTILES No one is likely to mistake a living bird for a reptile, but in the past the distinction would have been any- thing but easy; and even now the internal resem- blances are so great that it has been proposed to class the two together. It has, however, been found convenient to keep them separate as hitherto, and to bear their close relationship in mind. There are five orders of living reptiles—the croco- diles, the snakes, the lizards, the rhyncocephalians having only one living representative, the New Zealand tuatera, and the tortoises. CROCODILIA.-—The crocodiles have their teeth in distinct sockets, whereas the other reptiles have theirs growing to the jawbones. They have a four- chambered heart, and a diaphragm between the organs of their chest and.abdomen. They lay eggs about the size of those of a goose, which have a thin shell and are buried in a hollow in the ground, so as to be hatched by the heat of the sun ; and when the youngsters begin to cry within their shells the mother 220 REPTILES opens up the nest in order to set them free. There are only three genera—Crocodilus, Alligator, and Gavialis. The gavials, or gharials as they are now more usually called, are distinguishable at once by their long, narrow snouts. Their teeth are almost equal, and HEAD OF A CROCODILE the first and fourth in the lower jaw bite into grooves in the upper jaw. The gharials are only found in India, Borneo, and Northern Australia; they chiefly feed on fish, and one of their striking mecul nies is that the old males have what is practically an air- as ioe DN) NARS ARIS HEAD OF A GHARIAL bladder at the tip of their nose, it being a sort of knob at the end of the snout, containing a cavity for the retention of air to enable them to remain under water for a very much longer time than their females or their young. Gharials are not very large ALLIGATORS 221 asa rule; but G. gangeticus has been known to attain a length of twenty feet. The alligators, with the excep- tion of one species (A. szzenszs), found in the Yangtse Kiang, are exclusively American. Their head is broad and short; their teeth are very unequal in size, and the first and fourth teeth in the lower jaw bite into pits in the upper jaw. Another distinction is that, whereas in the gharials the plates, or ‘scutes,’ are continuous from head to tail, in the alligators there is a well-marked division between those of the HEAD OF AN ALLIGATOR neck and those of the back. There are black alli- gators in South America as far south as Rio Grande do Sul; the common North American species is A. misstssippiensts, but it is not so common as it used to be, and is now actually being preserved. The fashion for using alligator hides for bags and purses made it worth while to shoot alligators in large num- bers, and even to capture them alive, and start ‘alligator farming’ much as one would do with cattle or sheep. The alligators, however, lived on the water-voles, and the result of their captivity or de- 222 REPTILES struction was a plague of rodents, which nearly ruined the agriculturists. The agriculturists thereupon made the matter a political one, and thus it has come about that the Government of Florida has decreed a close time for A. mzsszsseppzensts. The crocodiles are found not Spin in Africa and Southern Asia, but in tropical Australia and Central America and the West Indies. They have a longer head than the alligator, but their snout is much broader and shorter than that of the gharials. Their teeth are not regular, and while the first tooth in the lower jaw bites into a pit, the fourth bites into a notch or groove. The largest species (C. forosus) is found in India and Australia, and is said to occa- sionally exceed twenty feet in length. The African crocodile (C. zz/otécus) is almost as large. The Indian crocodile has been seen to hunt in packs. Mr. E. C. Buck relates an instance of this which he observed at the mouth of a small stream leading from some inland lakes to the Ganges. ‘Towards dusk at the same moment every one of them left the bank on which they were lying, or the deep water in which they were swimming, and formed a line across the stream, which was about twenty yards wide. They had to form a double line, as there was not room for all in a single line. They then swam slowly up the shallow stream, driving the fish before them, and I saw two or three fish caught before they dis- appeared.’ OPHIDIA.—The first thing that strikes one on looking at a snake is that it has no visible limbs ; but a moment’s consideration will show that the absence THE TIGER SNAKE OF AUSTRALIA 224 REPTILES of limbs is no guide to classification, inasmuch as there are fishes without limbs, and amphibians without limbs, and even lizards without limbs. Asa matter of fact, too, the pythons have rudimentary hind legs. A snake is very much of a vertebrate—in some species there are 400 vertebre—and so quick is he in the use of his ribs that, as Sir Richard Owen says, ZEAE LON) oS | dle? We WIHAG ef Yip aS ips ik if SKELETON OF A PYTHON ‘he can outclimb the monkey, outswim the fish, out- leap the zebra, outwrestle the athlete, and crush the tiger. This mode of rib progression is not difficult to understand. ‘When a part of their body,’ says Mr. Boulenger, ‘has found some projection of the ground which affords it a point of support, the ribs, alternately of one and the other side, are drawn more SNAKES 22 closely together, thereby producing alternate bends of the body on the corresponding side. The hinder portion of the body being drawn after, some part of it finds another support on the rough ground or a projection, and the anterior bends being stretched in a straight line, the front part of the body is propelled in consequence.’ In short, the ‘soundless, causeless march of sequent rings,’ as Ruskin calls it, is an exceedingly rapid wriggle. A snake’s heart has three chambers ; his teeth are ~ not fitted into sockets, but look as if they were mere projections of the jawbone, and in some cases are quite rudimentary. His tongue is forked and retracted into a sheath; his fang, when he has one, is quite a different thing, being a long tooth in the front of the upper jaw having a hole down it through which he can squirt the poison when he strikes. The one thousand six hundred species of snakes are divisible into four groups—the burrowing snakes, the harmless snakes, the poisonous snakes, and the vipers. The burrowing snakes (Zyphlopide) have teeth in one jaw only, and are generally smaller than earthworms. They are found in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Australia, but no one but a naturalist takes the slightest notice of them. The vipers attract much more attention, owing to the perfection of their poisoning apparatus. The group includes the rattle- snakes (Crotalide), which are distinguishable from the true vipers by the pit between the eyeand the nostril, and by the rattle on the tail, which is apparently formed of epidermic remnants of previous skins. The vipers are chiefly African; the rattlesnakes—there P 226 REPTILES are twenty-three species of them—are exclusively American. The word viper is a contraction of Vzvz- para, the name given to the animal because its young are born alive, the eggs being hatched in the oviduct. The poisonous snakes, as distinct from the vipers, comprise the cobras, coral-snakes, and sea-snakes. THE RATTLESNAKE Some of the sea-snakes are twelve feet long; they live all their lives in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, between the tropics, feeding on fish, and are as easily recognisable by their paddle-shaped tails as the Crotalz by their rattles, and they are, if anything, more poisonous. The coral-snakes are chiefly Australian ; THE COBRA 227 they are pirates in the guise of merchantmen, having the appearance of harmless snakes, but being in reality most venomous. The hamadryad, which is allied to the cobras, is one of the few snakes that will attack Ses ee THE COBRA DI CAPELLO man without provocation, and the only thing to be said in its favour is that it feeds on other snakes. There is one at South Kensington which is thirteen feet long. The cobras are not exclusively Indian ; they are also found in Africa, in China, and in Java, P2 228 REPTILES and everywhere inspire the same terror among the natives. The harmless snakes include the great anaconda, which is thirty feet long—the largest of the boas, larger even than Boa constrictor, The boas are all South American; in the Old World they are repre- sented by the pythons, or rock-snakes; several genera of the Pythonide being Australian. The pythons can swim as well as climb, and some of them are four-and-twenty feet long. They none of them poison their prey ; they kill it by coiling round it and squeezing it. Among the other colubrine snakes are our own smooth snake and grass snake. LACERTILIA.—The lizards have been described as tailed reptiles having legs; but the legs and the tail are not to be trusted to, for in some cases a lizard will jerk off his tail and eat it for want of a meal, and find no difficulty in growing another ; and if he loses a leg he can in time replace it. The legs of the lizards are of every degree: there are lizards with five claws, lizards with four claws, lizards with three claws, lizards with two claws, lizards with one claw, lizards even with no claws or legs at all. There are over 1,500 lizards altogether—the lizards of the land, of the trees, of the water, even of the sea. One lizard only, the Mexican Heloderma horridum, is poisonous, and has fang-like teeth, The mouth of a snake is expansible, that of a lizard is not; and while the snakes have no breastbone, and never more than a trace of a pelvis, the lizards generally have both girdles, shoulder and hip, more or less THE MOLOCH LIZARD 230 REPTILES developed. The gecko lizards have fleshy plates on their feet, by which they are enabled not only to run up perpendicular walls, but even hang downwards on ceilings. The water lizards are over six feet long, and have a tail like a saw, with which a deep wound can be made. One lizard (Amblyrhynchus) lives on the rocks round the Galapagos Islands, and feeds on sea- weed. The frilled Australian lizard (Chlamydosaurus) enters into rivalry with the kangaroos, and hops about on his hind legs; but the most curious Australian lizard is the particularly harmless J7oloch, which possesses the most terrifying exterior of any animal on four legs. The chameleon is said to go to sleep only one side at a time, which is not an easy matter to prove. Like several other lizards, it has the power of changing its colour at will to suit its surroundings. The Amphisbena is a degenerate lizard, living under- ground, and very rudimentary in structure ; another rudimentary lizard is the blindworm, which has no legs visible outside the skin. One lizard, the tuatera, or Sphenodon, has an order all to itself, Rhyncho- cephalia, being the last living representative of a group at least as old as the Trias, which, according to Baur, ‘are certainly the most generalised group of all reptiles, and come nearest in many respects to that order of reptiles from which all others took their origin.’ This is the lizard with the rudimentary third eye, which is represented by the pineal gland in man. In the Varanus lizards the position of this eye is marked by a bright scale. CHELONIA.—The chelonians are the tortoise TORTOISES 231 and turtles, distinguishable enough from the other reptiles by their armour alone. There are four groups of them, the sea turtles, the fresh-water turtles, the fresh-water tortoises, and the land _ tortoises. There are two groups of sea turtles, the hard-shelled ones and the leathery ones. The leathery ones are a very old group, but are now represented by only one species, Dermochelys coriacea, which is occasionally over six feet long, and is found in most temperate and _ tropical seas, being inso many respects peculiar that some assign it to a special order devoted to itself and its long line of ancestors. If we admit this order, Athecaia, all the other chelonians will go to Testaudt- nata, and give no difficulty in sortation, for the marine turtles have feet like paddles ; the freshwater turtles have webbed feet with sharp claws on the three inner digits like the crocodile, and their upper shells or carapaces are covered with skin; the fresh- water tortoises have a plated carapace and long sharp claws to their feet ; and the land tortoises have club- shaped feet with blunt claws. The land tortoises do not eat cockroaches or vermin, but are vegetarians. Some of them, like Testudo mauritania, sold in the streets, are but a few inches long ; others, like those of the Galapagos and Mascarene Islands, are giants. They all have a domed carapace, which in the larger species can be pierced with a knife when alive. At South Kensington there is a land tortoise, brought home by Captain Cookson from Aldabra in 1875, which is known to have been more than eighty years old and to have weighed nearly eight hundredweight. The fresh-water tor- 232 REPTILES toises include a large number of species that can live as well on land. The most aquatic of them are the alligator terrapins of North America, which have a long crested tail like a crocodile ; another remark- able citizen of the United States is the box-tortoise, who has his lower shell hinged, so that he can shut himself up with a lid. There is one fresh-water Zz if esate THE MATAMATA tortoise, Emmys orbicularts, found in Europe now as far north as Berlin, which in the past used to live in our fen-lands. One species of this group, the bearded matamata of South America, is about three feet in length, and swims with its neck projecting, so as to strike at anything that may come along, and he has SEA TURTLES 233 been seen to catch birds and fish, so quick is he in movement. The fresh-water turtles have a much flatter shell, and they are all carnivorous in habit and tropical in habitat. Their shell is covered with skin, and their jaws have fleshy lips, and their snout ends in a tube, so that they can breathe with everything but the tip of their nose under water. The sea turtles are of more importance than all the rest from a commercial point of view. One of them is the hawk’s bill, whose epidermic plates furnish the tortoiseshell that is made into combs and used so much for inlaying, the best of which is imported into China from Celebes. Another is the green turtle, Chelone viridis, whose fate, both clear and thick, is soup ; his carapace or ‘upper shell’ yielding ‘cali- pash,’ his ‘under shell’ or plastron yielding ‘calipee.’ All the marine turtles are edible, both in flesh and eggs, but while C. wrzdzs is especially associated with the alderman, the others are only fully appre- ciated by the shipwrecked sailor. All the chelonians lay eggs, most of them having hard calcareous shells, and all of them are left to be hatched by the sun. The chelonians are a very old family—their repre- sentatives have been found as deep in the far past as the Permian ; but, indeed, all the reptiles have long pedigrees. They used literally to swarm on the face of the earth, and if we were merely to describe at any length the many species of the five orders-—Axomo- dontia, Sauropterygia, Ichthyopterygea, Dinosauria, Oruithosauria—now only known as fossils, we should more than fill this book. 234 CHAPTER IV AMPHIBIANS Ir is not an easy task to draw the frontier line between the birds and the reptiles, but it is still more difficult to separate the amphibia from the fishes. The amphibia and the reptiles used to be grouped together, but between them in their living forms a great gulf is fixed. The reptiles breathe by lungs all their life, the amphibia breathe by gills in their youth ; while some of them breathe by gills all along, and some of them take to lung-breathing in their mature age. The amphibians are a very old class. They were numerous on the earth as long ago as the formation of the coal measures. They are now generally con- sidered as divisible into four well-marked orders, one of which, Stegocephala, is extinct. The three living orders are: Hcaudata, without tails; Caudata, with tails ; and Agoda, without either tails or limbs. The first two of these used to bear the names of Anxoura and Urvodela, but these are now discarded. The Apoda are occasionally called Gymunophiona, just as the Stegocephala are perhaps as well known as the Labyrinthodontia. Yet one other change in nomen- FROGS AND TOADS 235 clature which should be noted, and that is the abandonment of the old designation of the class, Batrachia, for the more appropriate Amphzbza. ECAUDATA.—This is the highest order, and it consists of the frogs and toads and species close akin to them. There are over 1,000 species of these tailless genera, which are to be found almost everywhere, except in the polar regions. They vary in size from Rana Guppyt, nearly a foot over all, found in the Solomon Islands, down to the tiny tree-frogs. Some frogs have no tongue; to this group belongs the Surinam toad (Pzpa americana), in which the eggs are placed by the male in cells on the female’s back, where they stay until their metamorphosis is complete. This toad, like all the Pipide, is toothless, whereas the other tongueless toads have teeth in the upper jaw; one of them, Xenopus levis, living in tropical Africa, having a ten- tacle extending backwards on each side of the head. The Bufonide are the true toads. They have no teeth in the upper jaw, and the sacral vertebra is hatchet-shaped. One of the group (Wototrema marsupiatum) may be called a marsupial, for the female has a pouch into which the ova are introduced as soon as they are laid, and where they remain until they are hatched. One of these toads was found by Mr. Whymper on Antisana, over 13,000 feet above the sea. Another worthy of note is the horned toad (Ceratophrys), which has horns over its eyes and bony plates in the skin of its back. The typical genus Bufo has no teeth at all; two out of 236 AMPHIBIANS some seventy species (B. vulgaris and B. calamtta, the natterjack) are natives of Britain. Like all the other toads, they secrete a certain mildly-poisonous substance in their skin-glands, although there is one really venomous toad, which is found in Argentina. The tree-frogs (Hyde) have teeth in their upper jaw, but are otherwise like the toads in structure. In the frogs (Ranzd@) the sacral vertebra is not dilated, and there are generally teeth in the upper jaw. As there are two toads in this country, so are there two frogs: one (Rana temporaria) said to be native, the other (2. esculenta) found mostly in Norfolk, said to have been acclimatised from the Continent, and distinguishable from the common species by the absence of the black patch on the side of the head. The frog undergoes many changes before he reaches maturity. The chief stages, as _far as externals are concerned, are shown in our illustration. At 1 we have the egg as just laid ; at 2 we have it when the water has made its way in through the enclosing membrane and distended it, so as to leave the egg plenty of room; at 3 we have the young, after the egg has been laid about ten days, just before he is hatched; at 4 we have him about four days afterwards, as he makes his first appearance in the world, consisting apparently of only tail and head—that is, a tailed-poll, or tadpole, with gills on his neck; at 5 he has got a mouth, for up to now he has lived without one; at 6 he has got his front legs and is losing his gills; at 7 he has got his hind legs, he is working his lungs, and beginning to feed on his tail. As the supply it FROGS 237 affords becomes exhausted, the tadpole begins to look about for something else to feed on, and, suddenly changing his habits, becomes a carnivore instead of the vegetarian he has hitherto been. As he has changed in diet, so does he change in figure. His I 2 2 ° DEVELOPMENT OF THE FROG intestine becomes shorter, his liver and stomach grow bigger, his abdomen shrinks, his tail shortens up, and finally it disappears altogether and he is an unmistakable frog. We have said ‘he’ all through but, as a matter of fact, he is neither he nor she in 238 AMPHIBIANS particular, but can be made either according to the food that is discoverable. Naturally the sexes are in about equal proportions, but by feeding young tadpoles on beef and frog-flesh it has been found possible to turn nine out of ten of them into females. The frogs, as a rule, have ten vertebrz, but Pipa has only eight. The skeleton is peculiar from the enormous development of the pelvis, at the upper end of which comes the hump on the frog’s back. The bones of the fore-arm and shank are in each case anchylosed to form a single bone. A frog has no movable ribs, and hence the gulp with which it breathes. In fact, it swallows the air much as if it were water, so that it is possible to suffocate a frog by merely holding its mouth open. A good deal of respiration is also done by the skin, and hence if you butter a frog you cause its death. CAUDATA.—These are the tailed amphibians, and there are more than 100 species of them. Three of these are found in Britain—the crested newt (Molge cristata), the smooth newt (WZ. vulgaris), and the palmated newt (7. galmata), all of which live in the water during spring and summer, and on land during autumn and winter. Like the salamanders, they lose their gills before they reach maturity ; one species, however, the axolotl, retains its gills throughout. The Salamandride have eyelids, the Amphiumide have not; they are eel-like creatures, with small limbs almost at the extreme ends of their long bodies, and they lose their gills during metamorphosis, but retain the slit in adult life. ° SALAMANDERS 239 Proteus and Szren breathe by gills all through life, . and have no maxillary bones; Szrez has no hind legs. Proteus anguinus is a long white creature with feathery gills, which lives in the caves of Carniola all in darkness, and has only rudiments of eyes. The largest of the Caudata—and, indeed, the largest of the living amphibia—is the gigantic salamander of Eastern Asia, which is over four feet long. APODA.—In this order there are nearly forty species, all of them belonging to the Cecilide: burrowing creatures, like worms, without limbs, or girdles, or tail, and with rudimentary eyes and ten- tacles, most of them hatched from eggs, one, at least, of them being born alive. They are all found in the tropics—some in Asia, some in Africa, some in America—most of them spending their lives buried in the mud; some of them living in water; all of them more or less of a puzzle to the species-maker, and chiefly interesting as ‘links’ or ‘intermediates.’ Perhaps the most remarkable of the group is Icthyophis, which lays its eggs in a hole in damp earth, and then coils itself around them to protect them until they are hatched. 240 CHAPTER V FISHES THE fishes form the lowest class of vertebrated animals. They all have gills, by which they breathe the oxygen in the water, and they all breathe ex- clusively by gills, except one order of them, in which the air-bladder is used as a lung. It is now cus- tomary to divide the class into four orders: the teleostean, or bony fishes, to which the great bulk of our food fishes belong; the ganoid, or armoured fishes, like the sturgeon; the dipnoid, or mud-fishes, the double-breathers, like the Queensland barra- munda; and the cartilaginous fishes, like the sharks and rays. TELEOSTEI—If we say that these are the typical fishes, like the perch, it will save us a lengthy definition. They are conveniently divisible into six groups, of which the perch, the wrasse, the turbot, the salmon, the sea-horse, and the globe-fish may be taken as representatives. They all of them, except the last, have comb-like gills. The first four have movable upper jaws; the first two have spinous rays on the fins, the next two have no spinous rays; in PERCHES 241 the first the bones of the lower pharynx are separate, in the second they are united; in the fourth the ventral fins are posterior ; in the third they are either missing or placed on the throat. or breast. Combining these distinctive details, we shall find that the species of our first division have comb-like gills; that their premaxilla and upper jaw are movable; that. they have spinous rays on their dorsal, anal, and ventral fins; and that their lower pharynx bones are generally separate. At the head of these comes the perch (Perca fluviatilis), which is widely distributed over Europe, Northern Asia, and Northern America, and which, when full grown, may attain a length of eighteen inches, though most familiar to us as about half the size. There is one of the perch family, Mzcroperca, which when full grown is only an inch and a half long. The bass (Labrar) is also in this group, as are the pike-perches (Luczo- perca), some of which may reach four feet in length. The sea-perches (Sevranus) run to over seven feet long in some of their species. Another group consists of the red mullets, not the grey ones, distinguishable by their flattened bodies, large thin scales, feeble teeth, and the two long erectile ‘barbels’ at the mouth. Next to them come the sea-breams, re- cognisable at a glance by their flattish, oblong bodies and large eyes, but chiefly characterised by their peculiar teeth ; for they have cutting teeth in front of the jaws or else lateral molars, and sometimes they have both. To us the most familiar species is the shad (Pagellus centrodontus) ; but the largest of the group is Pagrus unicolor, the New Zealand snapper, Q 242 FISHES which is over three fect long. Another kindred group consists of the eccentric, brightly coloured coral fishes, with short, deep bodies, in which the scales are so thick on the fins that the body line is quite obscured. One of the most noteworthy of this group is the archer-fish (Zoxotes jaculator), which catches insects by shooting drops of water at them, and so making them fall into the stream. This fish is about seven inches long, and he can shoot five feet high, very seldom missing his aim. There are other species which have acquired the same curious habit. Next to them are placed the scorpzenid fishes, which have appendages about them like fronds of seaweed, in which they hide and with which they tempt smaller fishes to destruction. Then come the gurnards, which have armed heads, and in the esculent genus, 7vig/a, have the so-called ‘fingers’ as organs of locomotion as well as of touch. Another genus of this group is Dactylopierus, which comprises the handsomest of the fishes that are enabled to take such long leaps out of the water on their pectoral fins as to be called flying-fishes. The next step gives us the weevers, well known and hated by all fishermen for their poisonous spines, one of which is on the operculum, or gill-cover. The next takes us to the Scenzde, including the maigre and the drum, and the next to the Polynemzde, with the curious tactile organs form- ing a detached portion of their pectoral fin. Close akin to them is the West Indian barracuda, which reaches eight feet in length, and is voracious enough to attack man. The mackerels have a higher body temperature THE SWORD-FISH 243 than any other fishes, and are important contributors to the food supply of man. They abound in all the temperate and tropical seas except, curiously enough, on the American side of the South Atlantic, where no species of Scomber has yet been found. They may be looked upon as the hawks of the sea, preying ceaselessly upon other fishes, chasing them for enormous distances at high speeds. The biggest of the group is, perhaps, the Mediterranean tunny, which has been found even as far afield as the coasts of Tasmania, and which frequently reaches ten feet in length. The albacore belongs to this group, as also do the John Dory, the sucking-fishes, and the Coryphene—the ‘dolphins’ that hunt the flying-fish, and turn to such beautiful colours in their death- throes. The clumsy opah, or king-fish, also belongs to this group. The horse-mackerels belong to another group—the Carangide—which includes the yellow-tails and the pilot-fish that accompany the sharks, and which the sharks do not eat because they are not quick enough to catch them. Another and an even more numer- ous group are the sword-fishes, some of which are fifteen feet long. The sword-fish is the particular foe of the whale, and is supposed to attack boats and ships owing to his mistaking them for cetaceans. In the Dreadnought trial in 1864—an action brought against underwriters for damage said to have been caused by a sword-fish—many instances of their attacks were given in evidence by Sir Richard Owen and Frank Buckland. It appeared that a sword-fish had been caught by the crew and had broken away Q2 244 FISHES again, and that the same evening the ship sprang a leak, which leak, the owners asserted, was caused by a revengeful thrust from the angry fish! Against this the scientific witnesses deposed that, though a sword-fish frequently pierces a ship’s hull, he never gets his blade out again. The roughness of the underside of the jaw forbids its extraction. He has to break it off and leave it behind him, to die, pro- bably, in the attempt. An instance was cited in which the fish completely perforated the vessel’s side and poked his nose into the passenger’s berth. An even more remarkable case is recorded of the driving powers of the Xzphzas. H.M.S. Leopard was once pierced by a fish through an inch of sheathing, three inches of plank, and four-and-a-half inches of solid timber, eight-and-a-half inches of the sword being thus imbedded—-a record capped, Yankee-like, by the Hon. Josiah Robbins, who relates that the ship Fortune was struck by a sword-fish, which drove right through the copper, through an inch of board sheathing, three inches of hardwood plank, twelve inches of white oak, two-and-a-half inches of hard oak ceiling plank, and, lastly, through the head of an oil-cask, where it remained immovably fixed, without spilling the oil. An oldish inhabitant of this world is Xiphzas gladius. His remains are found as low down as the chalk. He is one of the largest of the thorny fishes, and consequently of these mackerel groups. He has not many near relatives, but one of them is the singular fan-fish, or sailor-fish of Ceylon, which hoists its fin like a leg-of-mutton mainsail, and beats to windward on the surface of the sea. \ LE ANE is THE NEST OF THE TEN-SPINED STICKLEBACK 246 FISHES In the Gobzde@ the ventral fins are united to form an adhesive disc, one of the group being the common lump-sucker (Cyclopterus lumpus). Another curious group consists of the angler-fishes, which have sea- weed-like processes around them, and take things easily on the sea-bottom, dangling tempting baits over their huge, gaping mouths. The next group are the blennies, the biggest of them being the sea- cat, six feet long. Yet another contains the ribbon- fish, and another the sea-surgeons, armed with a lancet on each side of their tail; and another, the Labyrinthict, to which belongs the climbing perch, which can even scramble up trees. After them come the Mugilide, or grey mullets, and then the Gastro- stetd@, or sticklebacks, which, like more than a dozen other fish, build nests for their young. The sticklebacks have spines, instead of dorsal fins. Those with fifteen spines are marine ; the other two, with ten spines or three spines, live in brackish or fresh water, the commonest being the three-spined one. They are the last of the acanthopterygian, or spiny-rayed fishes, in which the lower bones of the pharynx are not united. The union of these bones is the distinctive mark of the next assemblage. Of this group the most familiar representatives are the wrasses. These have a single dorsal fin, with a long spinous and shorter soft portion, and they are mostly recognisable by their thick lips. Some of them live on molluscs and crustaceans, and the teeth on their coalesced pharyngeal bones are specially adapted for crushing shells, while all the teeth in the jaws are conical, and arranged in a single series. A few of HERRING 247 the wrasses are herbivorous, while some live on corals and echinoderms. They are nearly all highly coloured, the most brilliant being, perhaps, the parrot wrasses of the Indian Ocean. ; In the next assemblage, the Anacanthinz, without spines in the anal, pelvic, and dorsal fins, are the cods and the turbots. In the cod group (Gadozdez) are four families, the most important of which are the Gadide, which include not only the cod and the haddock, but the whiting, the pollack, the hake, and the ling. Thesand-eels used for bait are also gadoids, as also are the macrurid fishes, found, some of them, three miles down in the ocean, and represented by about forty species distributed all over the globe. To the Pleuronectede belong most of the better-class flat fishes used as food—those which have the head twisted so as to bring both eyes on one side, like the turbot, the sole, the brill, the plaice, the flounder, and the halibut, which is the largest of all. In the next category—for there are over 12,000 species of fishes, and we must be brief—the central group is that of the herring brigade. There are nearly thirty other groups, all distinguished by having the fin-rays articulated, the ventral fins, when present, being without spines, and the air-bladder, if present, having a pneumatic duct. The cat-fishes have no scales ; their skins are either naked or pro- tected by bony scutes. With the exception of the sturgeon, they are the largest of European fresh-water fish. In tropical Africa there is an electric cat-fish (Malapterus) ; in tropical America there is one (Cal/- achthys) which has huge overlapping shields on its 248 FISHES body, and builds nests for its young. The carps (Cyprinidae) have no teeth in the jaws, but make up for the deficiency by enormous teeth in the throat. The carp is an acclimatised fish in this country, it being a native of China, whence it came here by way of Germany in 1614. The barbel, the roach, the chub, the tench, the bream, the bleak, the loach, and the minnow all belong to the same group. Another group dear to the angler is the Sa/nondde, which in- cludes not only the salmon, the trout, and the char, but the smelt and the grayling, and that curious fish the vendace, found in Britain only in one or two of the Scottish lakes, but widely distributed over Europe and North America in several more or less well- defined species. Of the Hsocide the best known representative is the pike; of the Scombresocide the Most conspicuous members are the common flying- fishes (Exocetus spilopterus) which take huge leaps of 150 yards or more from the surface of the tropical seas. To another group (the Osteoglosside) belongs the largest fresh-water bony fish, the ara- paima of Guiana, of which there is a specimen at South Kensington fifteen feet long. And here it may be fittingly said that these occasional references to our great Natural History Museum are made not because it contains the only collection or the best specimens, which in many cases it does not, but because it is one of the most generally accessible. A couple of hours spent in the bays of its entrance hall will teach the inquirer more natural history than as many months spent in the mere reading of books. The next group to that containing the gigantic SEA-HORSES 249 arapaima is the Chiedde, comprising not only the herring—that most useful of coast fishes—but the sprat and the pilchard, otherwise the sardine (Clupea pilchardus), and that biggest of bloaters, the tarpon (Megalops thrissoides), as tall as its catcher and looking taller when photographed five feet in front of him, as has been done for the purpose of illustration in certain magazines. Another group, not so far removed, in- cludes the electric eel of Brazil (Gymnotus electricus) ; and another (the Murenide) takes in the congers and other eels, fresh-water and marine. With them we end the long array of Physostomd. The Lophobranchiz, our fifth assemblage, need not detain us long. They consist chiefly of the pipe- fishes and sea-horses. The flippocampus, or sea- horse, is merely a bony pipe-fish, some six or eight inches long at his best, with tufted gills and flattened body, and: having his scales joined in ridges, with their three angles raised into a spine. He is known in twenty slightly differing forms, the commonest being drevirostris. When alive, swimming upright in his favourite position in the water, the general resemblance of his head to that of a horse is very marked. In dried cabinet specimens the resemblance is still more striking. A common object is hippo- campus in our public aquariums, and he is familiar to all who have voyaged in the Mediterranean. With the pectoral fins so curiously mimicking ears, and the peculiarly knowing eyes, one of which is generally higher than the other, Mr. and Mrs. Seahorse—the latter distinguished by the possession of an anal fin— are by no means unpopular, and are the cause of an 250 FISHES endless fund of amusement as they dart at their prey from the seaweed stems to which they anchor by their tails until they are well within range of their victims. With the Plectognatht, whose gills are composed of small spherical lobes, we reach an assemblage of eccentricities that conclude the long array of bony fishes. Here we get the file-fishes, which saw off the coral and chisel holes in the hard shells of the oysters ; here we have the coffer-fishes, who seem to struggle through life in a peculiarly angular mosaic greatcoat ; here we have the globe-fishes, who puff themselves out into balls, and stick out their enor- mous spines like caltrops, as if preparing to receive cavalry ; and here we have the sun-fishes, which look all head, with a frill round the neck, and seem to have left their bodies at home for alteration or repair. GANOIDE/.—This order had a glorious past, but is now represented by about seven genera, of which the chief are those containing the sturgeon and the bony pike. They are all armoured with thick, hard scales, and their internal skeleton is, as a tule, to a certain extent, cartilaginous. One of them (Lepzdosteus), the bony pike, has the vertebra convex in front and hollow behind, being thereby more reptilian than any other fish. This species, also known as the gar-pike, is found in Cuba and tem- perate America. It is about five feet in length, armoured in thick, hard, lozenge-shaped scales, which look like polished bone; its long, narrow snout has THE DOUBLE-BREATHERS 251 the upper lip longer than the lower, and the tail is heterocercal—that is, it has one lobe larger than the other, the backbone extending into the larger lobe— altogether, this voracious pike is just such a fish as one would expect to find swimming out of a-sand- stone bed. The sturgeons are much more lightly protected, their armour being represented by de- tached dermal plates of true bone. It is generally admitted that the bony fishes were derived from the ganoids through certain extinct forms. PIPNOI—This is another order with a long pedigree, one of its genera (Ceratodus) having per- sisted up to now since Permian times. Their teeth are remarkable for consisting of merely a pair of large molars in both jaws, and a pair of vomerine teeth ; but the main characteristics of the order are the amphibian nature of the heart, and the fact that the swim-bladder acts as a single or double lung; in short, the dipnoi, in many respects, clearly foreshadow the amphibians. The barramunda (Ceratodus For- stert) has red flesh, like a salmon, and is often called the Dawson salmon, from having been found in the Queensland river of that name. It is a curious- looking fish, almost oblong in shape, with short, eel- like tail and flipper-like lower fins, the fore-pair being close up to the gills) The other genera are the somewhat common African Protopterus, of which there are living examples in the Reptile House at the London Zoological Gardens, and the Lepilosiren of the Amazon, one of the rarest and most ancient- looking of modern fishes. Ceratodus, as we have 252 FISHES hinted, is the oldest living genus; but there were dipnoids in Devonian days. ELASMOBRANCHII—These are the cartila- ginous fishes ; the least specialised and most ancient of all. There is now in Japanese waters the oldest of living fishes—a shark named Chlamydoselachus, with direct ancestors of Devonian age ; but the order goes even further back, for we find it represented in Upper Silurian strata) The only bony structures worth mentioning in the order are the teeth and scales, the skeleton being almost entirely gristly or cartilaginous; and here it is we find the placoid scales, or skin teeth, which are plates tipped with enamel and based with bone. Some of these fishes use egg-purses for their ova, while others are vivi- parous. There are three main divisions of the order —the chimeras, the sharks, and the rays. The chimeras have but one external gill opening, and that is covered by a fold of the skin. They furnish the intermediate forms between the sharks and the ganoids, the best known of them being the king ot the herrings (Chimera monstrosa), a naked fish of surpassing ugliness. The sharks and rays have trans- verse mouths and from five to seven gill-openings, sharks having them on the sides of the body, while the rays have them underneath—the sharks being of the usual fish-like form, while the rays are flat, like the skate. Sharks have no scales, their skin being covered with the calcified papillee which, when small, distinguish the ‘shagreen’ of commerce. The blue sharks (Carcharias) are occasionally THE HAMMER HEADED SHARK 254 FISHES thirty feet long; the hammerheads (Zygena), with the curious right and left extensions of the head, are smaller but no less formidable. The Carcharodon may be forty feet long, but from a number of teeth dredged up by the Challenger, some of which were four inches across the base, it is supposed that a species of the genus over seventy feet long must be either living or only recently extinct. The thresher shark (Alopecias), with an enormous development of the main lobe of the tail, is about fifteen feet long, and . _ is as harmless to man as the basking shark (Selache maxima), which never attacks man unless in self- defence. The cestracionts, or Port Jackson sharks, are of great interest as being the direct descendants of primary forms, though only three genera out of some five and twenty have as yet been found living. With the smaller sharks are grouped the dog-fishes, that by way of the angel-fish and the Pristiophoride lead on to the rays, the gap being filled by the saw- fishes. ; The saw-fish has the long body of a shark and the ventral gill openings of a ray. His saw, like the sword of xiphias, is a long, flattened, bony snout, but it is double-edged and covered with a rough skin, and its score or more of serrations on each side may be looked upon as its false or pioneer teeth, the true teeth within its mouth being flat and grinding. The body may be a dozen feet long, and to this is to be added the saw, which may measure five. This saw exists in a rudimentary form in all the rays. It is smooth when the fish is young, the teeth appearing as the animal advances in age. It is well known as RAYS 250 a weapon amongst the Polynesian islanders, and, like the horn of the narwhal and the sword of the xiphias, is frequently found buried in the timbers of ocean- going ships. Notwithstanding its name (Pristis antiquorunt), the saw-fish is not as old in time as the sword-fish, for it first appears in the London clay. The electric rays (7 orpedinide) bear a familiar name in modern warfare. There are six species of torpedo, who all kill or stun their prey by an electric shock, three of them being natives of the Mediter- ranean. The true rays are found in all temperate seas, though most of them as yet come from the northern hemisphere. On our coasts the most fre- quent forms are the thornback (Raza clavata) and the common skate (R. datis). Some of the skates are giants, measuring seven feet across. The sting- rays belong to another group, the Zrygonide. The eagle-rays belong to yet. another, the Mylhobatide, these having the greatest fin-spread of any of the fishes, specimens measuring twenty feet in width being on record. They are the last of the living things called vertebrate. With them we end our survey of the aristocrats of animal life. Below them are the great majority from whom it is impossible to separate the higher classes, and from whom, through many a transition, they have undoubtedly risen in that great system of orderly growth under which Creation has attained its present state. Such a thing as chance or isolation in their history is inadmissible. As Professor Marshall says, in his Vertebrate - Embryology, ‘ All animals 256 FISHES living, or that ever have lived, are united together by blood relationship of varying nearness or remoteness; and every animal now in existence has a pedigree stretching back, not merely for ten or a hundred generations, but through all geologic time since life first commenced on the earth. The study of develop- ment has revealed to us that each animal bears the mark of its ancestry, and is compelled to discover its parentage in its own development; the phases through which an animal passes in its progress from the egg to the adult are no accidental freaks—no mere matters of developmental convenience, but represent more or less closely, in more or less modified manner, the successive ancestral stages through which the present condition has been acquired.’ But, seek as we may, there will remain the inevi- table Unknown, and in all, through all, and over all, the manifestation of that Overruling Intelligence, unresting from everlasting to everlasting, of Him of whom it is said :— ‘He sendeth forth springs into the valleys ; They run among the mountains ; They give drink to every beast of the field ; The wild asses quench their thirst. By them the fowl of the heaven have their habitation, They sing among the branches. He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, And herb for the service of man : That He may bring forth food out of the earth, And bread that strengtheneth man’s heart. O Lord, how manifold are Thy works ! In wisdom hast Thou made them all. ! ! Psalm civ. (R.V.) Spottiswoode & Co. Printers, New-street Sguare, London. Re, FOR THE WALLS OF SCHOOL AND MISSION ROOMS, 4s. Ad. each 0 thick paper Pai ey on linen; 28. 6d. on linen, eyelettec and varn' hed; 4s, eaten varnished, oog on roller ae Te i i" ; fesus and the Woman | | of Samaria. \ : Hr The Brazen Serpent. 15 ThePeart of Great Price 16 Finding the Lost Sheep. *17 The Conversion of Saut. 18 the. 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