Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/406

 they go into the houses as well as into the gardens and steal, plunder, and destroy at their hearts' desire. In many parts of India they have become a real plague, and the English officers are at times obliged, in order to limit the nuisance, to proceed against the tail-wearing saints with destructive measures, to the joy of the enlightened, intelligent natives, but to the disgust of the



pious, who are obstinately convinced that the place where a monkey is killed is unlucky forever afterward.

Another species of slender monkeys is distinguished by a striking peculiarity which is expressed in their name—the proboscis monkeys. In their more vigorous and heavier bodily structure they are more like the macacus monkeys, the principal and most numerous group of the family in the Indo-Chinese region, and the one, too, to which the mass of the population of our monkey-houses belong.

The proboscis monkey (Semnopithecus nasicus, Cuv.), in the outer development of its nasal organ, so surpasses all the monkeys and even all men that it has been set off as a distinct genus solely on account of this feature. It lives in the island of Borneo. The longitudinally furrowed, hook-shaped, flexible nose, impending over the mouth and an inch broad in the middle, is peculiar to the old male. Females and the young have instead of it only a small, depressed pug-nose. The tufted monkeys also deserve to be mentioned on account of their outward resemblance to the short-thumbed monkeys, which is given them by the long, rich