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One of the Lemurs is what is known as the colugo, or "flying lemur," which resembles a squirrel in many particulars, and yet has a membranous web extending from its hands, which enables it to make flying leaps over great distances. This last named variety seems to furnish a link between the insect-feeders and the Primates;
The terms "bimanous" and "quadrumanous" had been already employed by Buffon in 1766, but not applied in a strict zoological classification till so used by Blumenbach. Twelve years later, Cuvier adopted the same order Bimana for the human family, while the apes, monkeys, and lemurs constituted a separate order called Quadrumana. Respecting this last innovation, Isidore G. St.
PRIMATES. This order, which includes lemurs, monkeys, apes, and man, seems to have sprung from a creodont or insectivorous ancestry in the lower Eocene. Lemur-like types, with small, smooth brains, were abundant in the United States in the early Tertiary, but no primates have been found here in the middle Tertiary and later strata.
The last are not to be confounded with an animal bearing the same name the ay-ay of America. The latter is the singular creature known as the sloth, of which there are several distinct species, all inhabitants of the great forests of tropical America. Of the lemurs, at least thirty different kinds are known, more than half of which belong to the Island of Madagascar.
The lemurs are small animals very much like squirrels in their general form and in their tree-climbing habits. They live now almost exclusively on the island of Madagascar, but palæontology shows that they were more widely spread at an earlier time. Their teeth are exactly like our own, except that there is one more premolar on each side of each jaw.
While only in minor traits communal, they are eminently social, and have doubtless derived great advantage from this. The lemurs, which share their habitat and resemble them in organization, are markedly unsocial, and are as mentally dull as the apes are mentally quick.
Even now we have one living form, the curious Galeopithecus or flying lemur, which has only recently been separated from the lemurs, with which it was formerly united, to be classed as one of the insectivora; and it is only among the Opossums and some other marsupials that we again find hand-like feet with opposable thumbs, which are such a curious and constant feature of the monkey tribe.
And as to the foot, the great toe of the Marmoset is still more insignificant in proportion than that of the Orang while in the Lemurs it is very large, and as completely thumb-like and opposable as in the Gorilla but in these animals the second toe is often irregularly modified, and in some species the two principal bones of the tarsus, the 'astragalus' and the 'os calcis', are so immensely elongated as to render the foot, so far, totally unlike that of any other mammal.
If the evolutionary impulse had been checked or extinguished in the lemur that small apelike animal that went before the true ape, the fossil remains of which have been found on this continent and the survivals of which are now found in Madagascar would man have appeared? Again, if the race of lemurs developed from a single pair, how precarious seems our fate!
Indeed, a peculiar interest is now attached by me to each particular beast, for I have heard Mr. Robbins tell how in their native jungles or on their native pampas or in their native lagoons or among their native rocky fastnesses he sought and found and comprehended the lemurs, the bisons, the alligators, the rackaboars, and the other marvels of zoölogy.
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