Читать книгу Life at the Zoo: Notes and Traditions of the Regent's Park Gardens онлайн

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A near relation of the lemurs is a beautiful little creature, whose uncouth native name has not been replaced, called the “moholi.” It only differs from the lemurs in the shape of the ears, which in the moholi are either pricked up, like those of a bat, or folded down on its head at will. It has the same wonderful brown eyes, so large and round that they seem to occupy the greater part of the head; the moholi is, in fact, “all eyes.” As it stretches its slender arms out wide against the keeper’s chest, and turns its head to look at the visitors, it has the most winning expression of any quadruped we have ever seen. The coat, of a pinkish-grey above, turns into light saffron below, and the texture is less deep than the lemur’s fur. In touch it resembles floss-silk, thickly piled. The “Slow Loris,” from Malacca, is a tailless lemur. In exchange it has received a fretful temper, which seems a permanent trait in this species. When wakened it growls, bites, and fights, until once more allowed to sleep in peace. This loris hardly falls short of the beauty of the lemurs. The fur is cream-coloured, with a cinnamon stripe running from the head down the back. Of the three species which we have described, the first seems to combine some of the characteristics of the monkey and the mole, the second of the squirrel and the bat, the last those of the monkey and the weasel tribe. The “Slender Loris” is a still greater puzzle. It has all the characteristic “points” of the lemurs, without the tail. In size it resembles a squirrel; but its movements are so strange and deliberate, and so unlike those of any other quadruped, that it seems impossible to guess either at its habits or its purpose in creation. Each hand or foot is slowly raised from the branch on which it rests, brought forward, and set down again; the fingers then close on the wood until its grasp is secure, when the other limbs begin to move, like those of a mechanical toy. As we looked, its “affinities” with other types presently suggested themselves. It is a furry-coated chameleon. The round, protruding eyes, the slow mechanical movements, and the insect-feeding habits, are identical, except that the loris hunts by night and the chameleon by day. The loris even possesses an auxiliary tongue, which aids it in catching moths, just as the development of the same member marks the insect-catching lizard. From dawn till dusk all the lemurs are the very bond-slaves of sleep, hypnotized in the literal sense, drugged and steeped in slumber. Had the old poets known them, had the Phœnician sailors brought them back when they visited the land of Ophir, they would have been the consecrated companions of Somnus. Ovid’s famous picture of the Cave of Sleep, and the noiseless hall where