It may perhaps seem strange to many readers that instead of leaving the apes and monkeys to the last, as standing at the head of the animal kingdom, we should bring them in now, directly after such lowly creatures as hedgehogs and mice, bats and beavers. It must, however, be repeatedly borne in mind that we are not following a direct line upwards, but a family tree, which branches in all directions; and though the gap between monkeys and insectivora may be great, yet they have many more points in common than the monkeys have with any of the vegetable-feeders or carnivorous animals, and probably we should find these links even more marked if it were not that we know so very little of the early history of Monkeys. The reason of this probably is that they live and die in woods, where any remains of their bodies not eaten by other animals decay and crumble to dust, so that we have only here and there a few skeletons to tell any tale of their ancestors. And so it comes to pass that when we first meet with the great army of milk-givers (see p. 209), lemurs, and soon after true monkeys, existed, with thumbs on their hands and grasping great toes on their feet. In those times, when the climate of Europe and North America was warm and genial, they spread far and wide with the other animals over Germany, England, and the United States, where forests of palms, fig-trees, and evergreens afforded them a congenial home. But as soon as these began to fail and the climate of the northern countries became cold and cheerless, we find the monkey-kingdom growing narrower and narrower, till in our own day, while the flesh-feeders range from the Arctic Circle to the Equator, and the vegetarians have their reindeers travelling over ice and snow on the one hand, and their hippopotamuses and giraffes wandering under the burning sun of Africa on the other, the tender monkeys, which shiver in cold and damp and are constant victims to consumption, have shrunk back into the Tropics, where there is abundance of fruit and vegetation for their food. It is true a few kinds still linger in Japan, and one[151] on the sunny Rock of Gibraltar, while one or two wander up the mountains of Tibet into the regions of frost and snow; but, on the whole, monkeys are essentially inhabitants of warm countries, where the trees are perpetually covered with leaves and fruit, as in the luxuriant forests of South Asia and Tropical Africa in the Old World, and Tropical America in the New. Though they have but a narrow kingdom, however, there can be no doubt that they make the most of it, and have managed to develop shrewdness and a sense of fun and frolic which would be quite unaccountable if it were not for one peculiarity which they possess. This peculiarity is the grasping power of their hands and feet, which has caused them to become such active nimble creatures, swinging, leaping, and running quickly along the boughs of the tangled forests in which they live.