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Updated: May 2, 2025
What a distance there seems between such a tongue as this and your own little doorkeeper! But no wonder: we have now reached the confines of the kingdom of Mammalia, and the face of nature is beginning to change. The Armadillo, for instance, which comes next to the ant-eater, looks far more like the tortoise or lizard than its noble mammalian brethren.
When the ant-eater opens one of these galleries, the workers immediately run off and hide themselves, while the soldier-ants rush forth to attack the intruder, and, of course, immediately fall victims; thus preserving, by the sacrifice of their own lives, the rest of the community.
But it shan't be so any longer; I stand up for the aard-vark; and, although the tamanoir has been specially called Myrmecophaga, or ant-eater, I say that the Orycteropus is as good an ant-eater as he.
This ant-eater is known as the "pangolin," or "manis," but there are several species of "pangolin" not African. Some are met with in Southern Asia and the Indian islands. Totty soon produced a roasted "peacock," or rather a hastily-broiled bustard. But, although, perhaps, not cooked "to a turn," it was sufficiently well done to satisfy the stomachs for which it was intended.
The journey through the wood was long; it lasted the whole day, and so allowed plenty of time for examining the flora and fauna. Top, who took special charge of the fauna, ran through the grass and brushwood, putting up all sorts of game. Herbert and Gideon Spilett killed two kangaroos with bows and arrows, and also an animal which strongly resembled both a hedgehog and an ant-eater.
This animal is about two feet, long and resembles a rat, but having a long prehensile snout and the habits of an ant-eater, it is considered to be a remnant of the early zooelogical type from which diverged both the rodents and the insectivorous animals of the present. The Spaniards introduced the European domestic animals, which immediately began to flourish.
The tamandua has sometimes been called tridactyla, or the "three-toed ant-eater," because it has only three claws upon each of its fore-feet, whereas the tamanoir is provided with four. This one has only two claws on each fore-foot, hence its specific name. It is a very small creature not larger than the common grey squirrel with a prehensile tail like the tamandua.
The exhibitor begins, in proper showman style: "Ladies and gentlemen, I have the pleasure of exhibiting to your notice the celebrated 'What-do-you-think? or Giant Uncle-Eater. You have all probably heard of the Ant-Eater. This is, as you will readily perceive, a member of the same family, but more so!
For instance, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the giraffe, the antelope with undivided horns, the hedgehog, the mole proper, are only inhabitants of the Old World, whence also the horse originally came, the striped ones in Africa and the non-striped in Asia; on the other hand, the lemur, the ant-eater, the armadillo, and others, are limited to South America.
Again, there is a very general agreement respecting the characters and limits of the orders of Mammals, and as to the animals which are structurally necessitated to take a place in one or another order. No one doubts, for example, that the Sloth and the Ant-eater, the Kangaroo and the Opossum, the Tiger and the Badger, the Tapir and the Rhinoceros, are respectively members of the same orders.
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