The same traveller when once very hard up for food was obliged to kill a white-whiskered Coaita, and cook it. He writes:--“I thought the meat the best flavoured I had ever tasted. It resembled beef, but had a richer and sweeter taste. We smoke-dried the joints, and the last one was an arm with the clenched fist. This I used with great frugality, hanging it between meals on a nail in the cabin, and nothing but the hardest necessity could have driven me to an act so closely resembling cannibalism.” [Illustration: COAITA] THE CHAMECK, OR TSCHAKMECK.[85] An old author, Von Sack, in his voyage to Guinea, gives the following account of the manners of this Spider Monkey:--“It is of a very docile disposition, and capable of being quite domesticated. I have seen a pair of them at a gentleman’s house at Paramaribo, which were left quite at liberty. When the female negroes were employed at their needlework, they used to come and sit amongst them and play with pieces of paper, and afterwards go and gambol amongst the trees, but never went over to the neighbouring gardens. They well knew the hour of dinner of their master, when they would come to the gallery, look in at the windows, though without attempting to enter into the room, being aware that this was a liberty which was not allowed them; they therefore patiently waited for their dinner outside.” The Latin name of this species refers to its having hardly five fingers. It has four and a short stump of a thumb, visible and useless, but consisting of two bones, the usual muscles, and the skin covering. It is larger than the Coaita, and is black, and covered with long hair, but the face is brown. The tail is considerably longer than the body. THE BLACK SPIDER MONKEY. This Spider Monkey is more interesting for its geographical range and favourite localities than for anything else. It lives in Central America, north of Panama, and is common in the neighbourhood of the volcano called Orizaba, in the state of Vera Cruz. It lives in companies in the deep barrancas, up to an elevation of two thousand feet above the sea, and in the State of Oaxaca it roams in the forests up the country to a height of four thousand feet, being the same elevation to which the Tapir often reaches in its roaming. It is a black Ateles, with very long hair, which spreads out in all directions, but there is grey-white on the inside of the limbs, and underneath. It has no thumbs on the hands. [Illustration: CHAMECK.]