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Updated: July 18, 2025
The large apes are usually frugivorous, but some of them eat animal food. This is the case with both the chimpanzee and the gorilla.
I doubt whether this conjecture be well founded; it certainly does not apply to the Pteropus and the other frugivorous species, in which the faculty of sight is singularly clear.
It is almost the only frugivorous nocturnal bird that is yet known; the conformation of its feet sufficiently shows that it does not hunt like our owls. It feeds on very hard fruits, as the Nutcracker and the Pyrrhocorax. The latter nestles also in clefts of rocks, and is known under the name of night-crow.
The eloquent Shelley, in his notes to Queen Mab, pretty roundly assures us, that "according to comparative anatomy, man resembles frugivorous animals in everything, carnivorous in nothing;" and the famous author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, has quaintly but nervously observed, "As a lamp is choked with over much oil, or a fire with too much wood, so is the natural heat strangled in the body by the superfluous use of flesh; thus men wilfully pervert the good temperature of their bodies, stifle their wits, strangle nature, and degenerate into beasts."
A third necessity was very probably the exchange of the frugivorous for the carnivorous habit, which would act as a predisposing agency in inducing the animal to desert the tree for the ground, and to employ weapons in the chase.
Shall we offer a suggestion as to this new use? Such changes are usually the result of some change of habit in the animal, frequently one that has to do with its food. Change of diet or of the mode of obtaining food is the most potent influencing cause of change of habit in animals, and the one that first calls for consideration. The apes are frugivorous animals, though not exclusively so.
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