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Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/689

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MONKEYS FROM A COLD CLIMATE.
669

of coloration. In the former the side of the neck is gray rather than yellowish, and the tail is of a dull and uniform color. In the young monkeys the skull-cap is small, and the sides of the face are ornamented with a sort of whiskers, which disappear in the adult.

The natives give to the species the name of Kin-tsin-heou, i. e., Brown-and-gold monkey. They hunt it for the sake of its skin, which they use as a preventive against rheumatism.

In the same region with the Rhinopithecus there live in small troops, on the most inaccessible wooded declivities, other monkeys who display extreme agility, and who hide in caves, like the Magots or apes of Algeria or Gibraltar. These monkeys, it appears, were once very common here, one old hunter having boasted, in the hearing of M. David, of having killed seven or eight hundred of them in one year. Now, however, they are met with but seldom. With their very short tail and the long hair covering their bodies, they resemble the Magot, properly so called, but they are heavy built, and the face is longer. One individual, sent to the museum by the Abbé David, is eighty centimetres (2 ft. 712 in.) in length; his head is very large compared to his body; the face is bare and flesh-colored, darker and mottled around the eyes, and brownish about the mouth. Tufted whiskers of a bright gray adorn the sides of the head, and the forehead and the crown of the head are covered with short hairs, of a dull-brown color. The hair of the nape of the neck and of the shoulders is nearly as long as that of the Moupin monkey, and dark in color. The breast and belly are grayish. The anterior hands are small, while the posterior hands are well developed and heavily covered with hair on the upper surface. The tail is rudimentary, and the callosities well marked.

The female is smaller than the male; her skin is of a more uniform color, and softer, and her whiskers are not at all so long.

This species, called by Alphonse Milne-Edwards Macacus Thihetanus, would seem to be far more brutish than the preceding, for in the male the bony ridges of the skull are very prominent, and resemble those seen in the head of the gorilla.

In a species from Cochin-China, discovered by David, and described by Isidore Geoffrey St.-Hilaire, under the name of Macaque oursin, the cranium presents similar ridges, but far less developed. From the information gathered by M. David, it would appear that there exist in Eastern Tibet at least two other species of large, long-tailed monkeys; of these, the one is said to be of a greenish-yellow color, and the other of a deep black.—La Nature.