Karen Pritchard, age 9, of Louisville, Kentucky, for her question:

What is a loris?

The people of Malay call him the bashful cat. Long ago, Dutch travelers found him there and watched as he moved from bough to bough among the jungle trees. They had a word of their own that seemed just right for him. They called him the loris, from a Dutch name that means sloth or lazy bones.

The loris is at home in a steamy jungle. We can find him in the Philippines or Malaysia, in Southern India or Ceylon or in the tropical forests of Africa. He is a smallish, monkey type fellow and one of the world's slowest slow pokes. The smallest one is called the slender loris. He lives in India and Ceylon and in some ways he reminds you of a lazy a very lazy    kitten who has lost his tail. However, he has monkey type fingers. .and toes for clutching onto the boughs. His little round face has a little round nose and his little round ears are almost lost in his thick, gray, furry coat.

A loris has two huge, starry eyes and he looks at the world with a hazy stare. These eyes are the best kind for seeing at night. And night is the time for the furry slaw poke to go hunting for food. Perhaps he sees a moth in the greenery. Slowly, very slowly, he moves one hand, then a foot. He creeps along without rustling the leaves or making a sound. When he gets close enough, he makes a sudden lunge and grabs the moth in his hands. He also eats leaves and fruit and sometimes he catches a small lizard.

Before the sun rises, the lazy loris has filled his tummy and the time has come to sleep. He grasps a leafy branch with his strong fingers and toes and curls his furry body into a ball, tucking his little round nose down onto his furry tummy. He dozes all through the day and wakes up again after the sun sets.

The slender loris is slow, but compared with the gray loris of Malaysia, he is a whiz. This gray lc,ris is so slow that he is called the slow loris. He is a fat, chubby fellow, almost twice as big as his slender cousin and more than twice as slow. The Malay people call him the bashful cat because he often covers his face with his hands. They say that he sees spooks and hides his eyes so that he does not have to look at them. This, naturally, is nonsense. Some of their ideas about the harmless loris are even more unfair. They say that he is a sort of jinx and when a human crook gets caught, he often says that it was a witchy loris who made him commit the crime. Naturally, the furry little slow poke had nothing to do with it.

There are several other loris animals in other jungles. All of them are tree dwellers. All of them doze through the day and do their dining after dark. As a rule, they do not bother to mix with their relatives and each loris keeps to himself. Mrs. Loris has only one baby at a time and this only child is fed on mother's milk. He stays with Mama until he learns the lazy ways of a loris. Then he goes off to live a lonely life of his own. If he does not meet with a fatal accident, he may live to be a real old timer and celebrate 10 birthdays.