Page:Natural History (1848).djvu/38

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
28
QUADRUMANA.—CEBIDZ.


with a greenish shade about the head; the face and hands being dark purplish blue. It is about equal in size, but greatly superior in power, to an English mastiff. They associate in troops in the mountains of the Cape, lodging in the dens and shelves of the rocks, up the perpendicular face of which they climb with astonishing facility, assisted by the slender stems of numerous creep- ing plants.

Family II. Cebidæ.

(Monkeys of the New World.)

The Cebide are distinguished by the following characters:—Teeth; inc. 4/4; can. 1—1/1—1; mol. 6—6/6—6: = 36. Nostrils separated by a broad division. Tail long; in many cases prehensile, in others thick and bushy. No cheek-pouches, nor callosities. The distinctive character of the Quadrumana, the opposible power of the thumbs on all the extremities, is but slightly applicable to the American Monkeys. Mr. Ogilby, who has paid much attention to these animals, denies that in any genus of Cebidæ the thumbs of the fore hands are truly opposed to the fingers. These views are developed in a paper, published in a condensed form in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society for 1836, a part of which we subjoin.

"Of the eight natural genera, which include all the known Monkeys of the Western Hemisphere, one, Ateles, is entirely destitute of a thumb, or has that member existing only in a rudimentary form beneath the skin. In five others, Mycetes, Lagothrix, Aotus, Pithecia, and Hapale, the