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Updated: July 29, 2025
The missionary monks do not hesitate to eat these hams during Lent. According to their zoological classification they place the armadillo, the thick-nosed tapir, and the manatee, near the tortoises; the first, because it is covered with a hard armour like a sort of shell; and the others because they are amphibious.
His rounded body gives him some resemblance to a great hog, or a donkey with its hair shaved off; but, in fact, he is not very like either; he is more like a tapir than anything else that is, he is a creature sui generis.
When, some six years previously, he had spoken to me in the White House about taking this South American trip, I had answered that I could not, as I intended to go to Africa, but added that I hoped some day to go to South America and that if I did so I should try to shoot both a jaguar and a tapir, as they were the characteristic big-game animals of the country.
They were regular medical pedlars; for they had powders, salves, plasters, seeds, and roots of every description; claws of the tapir, as a remedy against the falling-sickness; and the teeth of poisonous snakes, carefully stuck into rushes, as specifics against head-ache and blindness.
This soon leading him to the place where Halberger entered the sumac grove. Now the gaucho, entering it also, and following the slot along the tapir path, at a distance of some three hundred yards from the crossing, comes out into an open glade, lit up by the last rays of the setting sun, which fall slantingly through the trees standing around.
I could not shoot, for it was directly in line with one of the pursuing dugouts. Suddenly it dived, the snout being slightly curved downward as it did so. There was no trace of it; we gazed eagerly in all directions; the dugout in front came alongside our canoe and the paddlers rested, their paddles ready. Then we made out the tapir clambering up the bank.
In the Eocene period there lived in the Egyptian region an animal, something like the tapir in size and appearance, which had its second incisors developed into small tusks and to judge from the nasal opening in the skull a somewhat prolonged snout. In the later Eocene a larger and more advanced animal, the Palaeomastodon, makes its appearance.
The tapir stopped feeding for a moment, but then recommenced, though evidently not with as much eagerness as before. Presently he stopped a second time, and seemed undetermined as to whether he should not turn and take to the clear water.
As in the case of the jaguar, its colour could not be distinguished, but its shape was very remarkable. Dyer compared it to a pig with exceptionally thick legs and a peculiar, elongated snout; and that was about as near as he could reasonably be expected to get to it. It subsequently became known to natural historians as the tapir.
There is no reason why it should not be, for the animal is a clean feeder, and lives altogether on vegetable substances the leaves and tender shoots of trees, with several species of bulbous roots, which he well knows how to extract from the ground with his tusks and trunk. I allude to the South American tapir. The quality of the food, therefore, is no criterion of the quality of the flesh.
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