Page:The naturalist on the River Amazons 1863 v2.djvu/327

 been made colonel of the new national guard. They had been obtained with great difficulty in the forests which cover the low lands, near the principal mouth of the Japurá, about thirty miles from Ega. It was the first time I had seen this most curious of all the South American monkeys, and one that appears to have escaped the notice of Spix and Martius. I afterwards made a journey to the district inhabited by it, but did not then succeed in obtaining specimens; before leaving the country, however, I acquired two individuals, one of which lived in my house for several weeks.

The scarlet-faced monkey belongs, in all essential points of structure, to the same family (Cebidæ) as the rest of the large-sized American species; but it differs from all its relatives in having only the rudiment of a tail, a member which reaches in some allied kinds the highest grade of development known in the order. It was so unusual to see a nearly tailless monkey from America, that naturalists thought, when the first specimens arrived in Europe, that the member had been shortened artificially. Nevertheless, the Uakarí is not quite isolated from its related species of the same family, several other kinds, also found on the Amazons, forming a graduated passage between the extreme forms as regards the tail. The appendage reaches its perfection in those genera (the Howlers, the Lagothrix and the Spider monkeys) in which it presents on its under-surface near the tip a naked palm, which makes it sensitive and useful as a fifth hand in climbing. In the rest of the genera of Cebidæ (seven in number, containing thirty-eight species), the tail is weaker in structure, entirely