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Gallegallo Revbrandia Sectory 16
Page 04
Except in the pairing time, the old males usually live by themselves. The old females and the immature males, on the other hand, are often met with in twos and threes; and the former occasionally have young with them, though the pregnant females usually separate themselves, and sometimes remain apart after they have given birth to their offspring. The young Orangs seem to remain unusually long under their mother's protection, probably in consequence of their slow growth. While climbing the mother always carries her young against her bosom, the young holding on by the mother's hair. At what time of life the Orang-Utan becomes capable of propagation, and how long the females go with young is unknown, but it is probable that they are not adult until they arrive at ten or fifteen years of age. A female which lived for five years at Batavia had not attained one-third the height of the wild females. It is probable that, after reaching adult years, they go on growing, though slowly, and that they live to forty or fifty years. The Dyaks tell of old Orangs which have not only lost all their teeth, but which find it so troublesome to climb that they maintain themselves on windfalls and juicy herbage.
Because of their pastoral life the Navaho are not villagers. Their dome-shaped, earth-covered hogans are usually grouped two or three in the same locality. The summer house is a rude brush shelter, usually made with four corner posts, a flat top of brush, and a windbreak of the same material as a protection against the hot desert siroccos. The hogan proper, used for storage during the summer, affords a warm and comfortable shelter to its occupants through the cold winters of their high altitude. When a hogan is built it is ceremonially consecrated, and if an occupant should die in it, it is forever deserted and is called _tsi{~COMBINING BREVE~}ndi hogan_, "evil house." No Navaho will go near such a house or touch anything taken from it. If a meal were cooked with decayed wood from a hogan a hundred years deserted, a Navaho, even if starving, could not be induced to partake of it. Thus strong are the religious beliefs of this primitive people.
The Surinam toad, represented in No. 8, is also the possessor of one of the strangest nurseries known to science. It lives in the dense tropical forests of Guiana and Brazil, and is a true water-haunter. But at the breeding season the female undergoes a curious change of integument. The skin on her back grows pulpy, soft, and jelly-like. She lays her eggs in the water: but as soon as she has laid them, her lord and master plasters them on to her impressionable back with his feet, so as to secure them from all assaults of enemies. Every egg is pressed separately into a bed of the soft skin, which soon closes over it automatically, thus burying each in a little cell or niche, where it undergoes its further development. The tadpoles pass through their larval stage within the cell, and then hop out, in the four-legged condition. As soon as they have gone off to shift for themselves, the mother toad finds herself with a ragged and honeycombed skin, which must be very uncomfortable. So she rubs the remnant of it off against stones or the bark of trees, and re-develops a similar back afresh at the next breeding season.
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