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Swainson, who alone has given a review of the animal kingdom on the Macleay system, unfortunately writes on this subject in a manner which excites a suspicion as to his judgment. His arrangement of the first or typical order of the mammalia is therefore to be received with great hesitation. It is as follows: Typical Quadrumana Pre-eminently organized for grasping.
Here its denizens quadrupeds, quadrumana, birds, reptiles, and insects might be seen following out their various habits of life, obedient only to the passions or instincts that had been implanted in them by Nature herself, but little modified by the presence of man.
It is found on the borders of the Negro, where it is known by several names among others, as the mono faio, or ugly monkey. The most active, playful, and amusing of animals are the midas monkeys, which form the second family of American Quadrumana, several species of which exist, each in its respective district.
This creature, if its whole structure had been examined by a naturalist, would have been classed among the Quadrumana, as surely as the still more ancient progenitor of the Old and New World monkeys. This animal seems to have been more like the larvæ of the existing marine Ascidians than any other known form.
At first sight, the termination of the hind limb of the Gorilla looks very hand-like, and as it is still more so in many of the lower apes, it is not wonderful that the appellation "Quadrumana," or four-handed creatures, adopted from the older anatomists by Blumenbach, and unfortunately rendered current by Cuvier, should have gained such wide acceptance as a name for the Simian group.
Judging from the habits of savages and of the greater number of the Quadrumana, primeval men, and even their ape-like progenitors, probably lived in society. With strictly social animals, natural selection sometimes acts on the individual, through the preservation of variations which are beneficial to the community.
In like manner, in the Pampas of South America the skeletons of Megatherium, Megalonyx, Glyptodon, Mylodon, Toxodon, Macrauchenia, and other extinct forms, are analogous to the living sloth, armadillo, cavy, capybara, and llama. The fossil quadrumana, also associated with some of these forms in the Brazilian caves, belong to the Platyrrhine family of monkeys, now peculiar to South America.
Recently many of our best naturalists have recurred to the view first propounded by Linnaeus, so remarkable for his sagacity, and have placed man in the same Order with the Quadrumana, under the title of the Primates.
Dangerous these gigantic quadrumana are, nevertheless; their superhuman strength enabling them to make terrible havoc wherever and whenever their fury becomes aroused. But without provocation this rarely occurs, and a man or woman who passes by them without making a noise, is not likely to be molested.
But if the occasional development of this structure in man is, as seems probable, due to reversion, it is a return to a very ancient state of things, because in the higher Quadrumana it is absent. There is another foramen or perforation in the humerus, occasionally present in man, which may be called the inter-condyloid. Mr. St. George Mivart, 'Transactions Phil.
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