Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 5 (1901).djvu/262

238 markings sometimes found on the Dolphin (Grampus griseus) are now generally accepted as the traces of encounters between these animals and large Cuttle-fishes. These markings are well figured in Flower's paper in the Trans. Zool. Soc. (vol. viii. pi. 1), and the suggestion was first made by Capt. Chaves, of Ponta Delgada. Prof. D'Arcy W. Thompson, in the last issue of the Ann. and Mag. Nat. Hist., has drawn attention to an older illustration of a Dolphin on which a great Cuttle-fish has left his unmistakable marks. The figure referred to is that on pi. xxviii. (Mammiferes), fig. 2, of the 'Voyage de I'Astrolabe,' and represents the lower surface of the head of Delphinus novæa-zelandiæ, Q. et G. The writer remarks:—"A glance at the figure will show that the so-called pores are the clear impressions of the suckers of a Cuttle-fish. The Dolphin itself was 5 feet 10 inches long, and we may judge from the figures that the sucker-rings were about, or very nearly, an inch in diameter. We may, perhaps, go a little further, and surmise that while these impressions were left by the suckers, the patches of 'striæ' were produced by tentacular hooks—in short, that the Cuttle-fish which made both was a giant Onychoteuthis."

the 'Athenaeum' for June 1st, Mr. James Platt, Jun., has communicated an interesting letter on the Brazilian names of Monkeys.

"There is an interesting little group of five native names of South American Monkeys—saguin, sapajou, sai, saimiri, sajou—of which the 'Century Dictionary' remarks that they are 'now become inextricably confounded by the different usages of authors, if, indeed, they had originally specific meanings.' The 'Century' vouchsafes practically no etymology of these zoological terms. They all belong to the Tupi language of Brazil. Sai is the word for Monkey. Sai-miri is its diminutive, from miri, meaning little. Sajou, on the contrary, is a French contraction for sajouassou, as Buffon spells it, or sai-uassu, as it should be written, where the termination -uassu is augmentative. We thus arrive at three shades of meaning to begin with. Research among old French works of travel would have thrown further light on the distinction between these terms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Jean de Lery, 1580, carefully separates çay, Gueuon, from sagouin, Marmot. A still better authority is Claude d'Abbeville, whose 'Mission en Maragnan,' 1614, pp. 252–3, adduces all five names, in his orthography sagouy, sapaiou, çayou, çaymiry, çayouassou. The last he defines as 'grande monne ou grande guenon.' Sapaiou, according to him, really is a synonym for çaymiry.

"A sixth hitherto unexplained word for a kind of Monkey is ouarine,