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Updated: June 7, 2025
Off his horse his motions are awkward, like those of certain tardigrade mammals of arboreal habits when removed from their tree. He waddles in his walk; his hands feel for the reins; his toes turn inwards like a duck's. And here, perhaps, we can see why foreign travellers, judging him from their own standpoint, invariably bring against him the charge of laziness.
For the present all we can say is that in the earliest spread of the patriarchal mammal race one branch adopted arboreal life, and evolved in the direction of the femurs and the apes. The generally arboreal character of the Primates justifies this conclusion. In the Miocene period we find a great expansion of the monkeys.
In truth, he is almost as fully arboreal as was his tree-dwelling ancestor and as are his forest relatives, the anthropoid apes of to-day; not inhabiting the limbs of trees, indeed, but living under their shade, and forming the true man of the woodland, the nomad hunters of the vast equatorial forests. It must be said, however, that this is not wholly the case.
The "hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits," this good fellow carried hidden in his nature, apparently, something destined to develop into a necessity for humane letters. Nay, more: we seem finally to be even led to the further conclusion that our hairy ancestor carried in his nature, also, a necessity for Greek.
About two miles away on a hill was a big white house in a grove surrounded by a wide-spread agricultural agglomeration of fields and barns and pastures and out-houses. "'Whose house is that? we asked the landlord. "'That, says he, 'is the domicile and the arboreal, terrestrial and horticultural accessories of Farmer Ezra Plunkett, one of our county's most progressive citizens.
Again, it will be found that in the natural position of standing we are not perfectly flat-footed, but tend to press much more on the outer than on the inner edge of the foot. This tendency, surviving after ages of living on the level ground, is a lingering effect of the far-off arboreal days.
Guavas, oranges and lemons grew here, too, and many beautiful banana-palms. The rank forest growth had been so thoroughly cleared out that it had not yet returned, except stealthily in the shape of brilliant-flowered creepers which wound their sinuous way from tree to tree, like fair Delilahs striving to overcome arboreal Samsons by their wiles.
Covered from end to end with Anthropoids, it swayed heavily. Had men been on it, all must have been flung into the rapids by the shock. But these beast-things, used to arboreal work, to scaling cliffs, to every kind of dangerous adventuring, nearly all succeeded in clinging. Only three or four were shaken off, to catapult over and over down into the foaming lash of the river.
If we could see this ancient creature in its arboreal home, we should probably find it more inclined to stand erect than the other apes, walking on a lower limb, and steadying itself by grasping an upper limb.
Especially had he been in quest of the famed jungle butterfly, a foot across from wing-tip to wing-tip, as velvet-dusky of lack of colour as was the gloom of the roof, of such lofty arboreal habits that it resorted only to the jungle roof and could be brought down only by a dose of shot. It was for this purpose that Sagawa had carried the ten-gauge shot-gun.
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