This Lemuroid is probably the best known to travellers in Madagascar, at least by ear, as no one can travel along the most frequented route in the island, that from Tamatave to Antananarivo, without often hearing the cries of these animals as he passes through the great forest. They are not often seen, but their long drawn-out melancholy cries are frequently heard, a {110}strange wailing sound, as if of people in distress, or children crying. Dr. Vinson says that the Bètànimèna tribe let these animals at liberty if they find them in captivity, and give them burial should they find them dead. They relate that a certain tribe, at war with its neighbours, took refuge in the forests; their enemies, in pursuing them, led by the sound of human voices, as they supposed, found before them a troop of _Bàbakòto_, at whose appearance they were struck with terror. They fled, persuaded that the fugitives had been changed into beasts. These, on the other hand, vowed eternal gratitude to the Lemurs who had saved them, and have ever since religiously refrained from injuring them in any way. EXTINCT LEMUROIDEA. On a former page (_anteà_, p. 13), attention was drawn to the interrupted distribution of the Lemurs, and to their present restricted range to the tropical and sub-tropical regions of Africa, of Madagascar, and of part of the mainland and of the islands of the Asiatic continent. In times geologically not very remote, they were inhabitants of both worlds. The earliest appearance of the Primates in time is at the beginning of the Tertiary period. Lemuroids, some of them of a more or less primitive type, then lived in Europe in the Lower Eocene period. In the higher beds of the same epoch (to which the fresh-water deposits of the London clay of England, the Plastic clay of France, and the prolific Wasatch beds of Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado of America belong) undoubted Lemurs are represented by many genera, which in the Middle Eocene attained to a great development. In the Upper Eocene of Europe many distinctively {111}Lemuroid genera (_Adapis_, _Microchærus_, &c.) "formed," as Zittel remarks, "a very characteristic element of the fauna; they are connected with old Tertiary fore-runners, and combine features of the existing Lemurs and true Apes." The presence of these heat-loving animals in such northern latitudes undoubtedly indicates the existence there of a climate more genial at that epoch than now. In the corresponding period in North America remains have been less plentifully found; but for the most part the genera are representatives of those of the European beds. In strata of Oligocene and older Miocene age no Lemuroid remains have come to light in Europe, and they are represented by only one or two doubtful forms in America. After that date they apparently vanished from the New World and from the northern portions of the Old.