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 almost certain that the horse came later.  The horse for an age or two, certainly for many hundreds of thousands of years, throve greatly and developed not only several different species but even different genera.  It was much the most highly specialized of the two, and in the other continental regions where both were found the horse outlasted the tapir.  But in South America the tapir outlasted the horse.  From unknown causes the various genera and species of horses died out, while the tapir has persisted.  The highly specialized, highly developed beasts, which represented such a full evolutionary development, died out, while their less specialized remote kinsfolk, which had not developed, clung to life and throve; and this although the direct reverse was occurring in North America and in the Old World.  It is one of the innumerable and at present insoluble problems in the history of life on our planet.