The tapir I killed was a big one. I did not wish to kill another,
unless, of course, it became advisable to do so for food; whereas I
did wish to get some specimens of the big, white-lipped peccary, the
"queixa" (pronounced "cashada") of the Brazilians, which would make
our collection of the big mammals of the Brazilian forests almost
complete. The remaining members of the party killed two or three more
tapirs. One was a bull, full grown but very much smaller than the
animal I had killed. The hunters said that this was a distinct kind.
The skull and skin were sent back with the other specimens to the
American Museum, where after due examination and comparison its
specific identify will be established. Tapirs are solitary beasts. Two
are rarely found together, except in the case of a cow and its spotted
and streaked calf. They live in dense cover, usually lying down in the
daytime and at night coming out to feed, and going to the river or to
some lagoon to bathe and swim. From this camp Sigg took Lieutenant
Lyra back to Caceres to get something that had been overlooked. They
went in a rowboat to which the motor had been attached, and at night
on the way back almost ran over a tapir that was swimming. But in
unfrequented places tapirs both feed and bathe during the day. The
stomach of the one I shot contained big palm-nuts; they had been
swallowed without enough mastication to break the kernel, the outer
pulp being what the tapir prized. Tapirs gallop well, and their tough
hide and wedge shape enable them to go at speed through very dense
cover. They try to stamp on, and even to bite, a foe, but are only
clumsy fighters.

The tapir is a very archaic type of ungulate, not unlike the non-
specialized beasts of the Oligocene. From some such ancestral type the
highly specialized one-toed modern horse has evolved, while during the
uncounted ages that saw the horse thus develop the tapir has continued
substantially unchanged. Originally the tapirs dwelt in the northern
hemisphere, but there they gradually died out, the more specialized
horse, and even for long ages the rhinoceros, persisting after they
had vanished; and nowadays the surviving tapirs are found in Malaysia
and South America, far from their original home. The relations of the
horse and tapir in the paleontological history of South America are
very curious. Both were, geologically speaking, comparatively recent
immigrants, and if they came at different dates it is