Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/618

600 societies and multitudes of secular and clerical mendicants; and Sir Emerson Tennent estimates that the produce of fully ten per cent of all the stipends of a most charitable population of one hundred and sixty millions is consecrated to the support of lazy or mischievous brutes.

Like Italian lazzaroni, city baboons live in cliques—clannish communities, very exclusive in times of scarcity, and always rather disinclined



to enlarge their membership except by natural increase and advantageous alliances, as with fat house-baboons with a roving disposition. Four-handed vagrants are promptly stopped and cross-examined: no mercy for the homeless stranger suspected of speculating upon a share of their scanty sportules, while the household