trees. Then we came on a party of coatis, which look like reddish,
long-snouted, long-tailed, lanky raccoons. They were in the top of a
big tree. One, when shot at and missed, bounced down to the ground,
and ran off through the bushes; Kermit ran after it and secured it. He
came back, to find us peering hopelessly up into the tree top, trying
to place where the other coatis were. Kermit solved the difficulty by
going up along some huge twisted lianas for forty or fifty feet and
exploring the upper branches; whereupon down came three other coatis
through the branches, one being caught by the dogs and the other two
escaping. Coatis fight savagely with both teeth and claws. Miller told
us that he once saw one of them kill a dog. They feed on all small
mammals, birds, and reptiles, and even on some large ones; they kill
iguanas; Cherrie saw a rattling chase through the trees, a coati
following an iguana at full speed. We heard the rush of a couple of
tapirs, as they broke away in the jungle in front of the dogs and
headed, according to their custom, for the river; but we never saw
them. One of the party shot a bush deer--a very pretty, graceful
creature, smaller than our whitetail deer, but kin to it and doubtless
the southernmost representative of the whitetail group.

The whitetail deer--using the word to designate a group of deer which
can neither be called a subgenus with many species, nor a widely
spread species diverging into many varieties--is the only North
American species which has spread down into and has outlying
representatives in South America. It has been contended that the
species has spread from South America northward. I do not think so;
and the specimen thus obtained furnished a probable refutation of the
theory. It was a buck, and had just shed its small antlers. The
antlers are, therefore, shed at the same time as in the north, and it
appears that they are grown at the same time as in the north. Yet this
variety now dwells in the tropics south of the equator, where the
spring, and the breeding season for most birds, comes at the time of
the northern fall in September, October, and November. That the deer
is an intrusive immigrant, and that it has not yet been in South
America long enough to change its mating season in accordance with the
climate, as the birds--geologically doubtless very old residents--have
changed their breeding season, is rendered probable by the fact that
it conforms so exactly in