Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/407

Rh of the whole dark-gray body, even of the under side and the exposed surfaces of the hands and feet. On the head the hair is prolonged and erected in a peculiar way to form a long, stiff tuft, or rather mane, which extends down to the neck. Its habitat is in Farther India (Siam) and the larger Sunda Islands (Java and Sumatra).

The most prominent members of the group of South African short-thumbed apes is the guereza (Colobus guereza, Rüpp). This monkey is one of the most famous animals, and one of those which are most fully and imaginatively described in all special works and portrayed in plain and in fantastic styles; so that every owner of a natural history knows it by name, but nobody has seen it living. We do no wrong to truth when we say that the first guerezas which were seen living in the European public were the three specimens which were carried in a drosky in August, 1890, before our offices in the Berlin Zoological Gardens. A Greek had brought them from Massawah to Berlin, but our privilege of becoming acquainted with them is due chiefly to the disinterested intervention of Herr Menges, a much-traveled dealer and the director of the Somali exhibitions. I paid a considerable sum for them, and am not sorry for it, for, although none of these specimens is living now, they made students, artists, and friends of animals acquainted with one of the handsomest and most remarkable creatures known, and gave them opportunity to make the first correct pictures of it from life. The picture makes a more detailed description of the coloring of the guereza unnecessary; and I will only say that the way in which the white appears, as in a certain sense a border and trimming of the dark ground color, varies somewhat and might probably afford a means of distinguishing between the geographical varieties of a species that is distributed over the whole of interior Africa. Hans Meyer, the hardy conqueror of Africa's giant mountain Kilima Njaro, found in that region a form which he named caudatus, in which the whole tail is white; our specimens belong to a variety called occidentalis in Rocheprune's monograph on the short-thumbed monkeys. A considerable number of species of monkeys of western and central Africa are pictured and described in this special work; many of them, including the bear short-thumbed monkeys (Colobus ursinus, Waterh.), look much like a guereza without a side-mane; others, like the devil-monkey (Colobus satanas, Og.), are described as black; and still others are red. Of all these we know little except concerning the skins and the skulls, for they reach us living only exceptionally. I return to the guereza, the handsomest and most interesting species.

The trio of them which I got, all three young, perhaps half-grown fellows, were distinguished by something pretty and