Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/31

Rh and many of them have very strong ones. Excepting the solitary and taciturn orang-outang, the species which live in troops are chatterers, and keep up a great hubbub. The principal tones of their noisy and rapid language, with the frequent repetitions of the same sounds, may also be found in the languages of the most savage peoples. They are, for the most part, complex, guttural, and harsh articulations, with few variations. But the alphabets of some of the African and Melanesian nations are not much richer. In both, it is generally the labials which are wanting. Laughter is not wholly peculiar to men, for some monkeys have a noisy and expansive laugh analogous to ours. Cook has stated that natives of the New Hebrides express their joy by a kind of guttural whistle, analogous to the jerky, rattling laugh of some monkeys. Monkeys are also capable of showing sorrow and weeping; and it is possible to follow on their faces the equivalents of the physiognomical changes which in man answer to the expression of his various emotions. Among these are the drawing back of the corners of the mouth and the contraction of the lower eyelid, which constitute the monkey's smile, and the depression of the eyebrow and forehead in anger.

It can hardly be doubted at this day that monkeys have collective feasts, which Houzeau compares with the new-moon festivals of the negroes, Hottentots, and Papuans. Such assemblies take place among South American monkeys, when, having eaten up the resources of one place, they are about to emigrate to another. Duvancel witnessed, at Deobund, in India, a great meeting of monkeys, which the natives said took place regularly, after intervals of several years. They came up by thousands, from different directions, all marching with sticks in their hands. Arrived at the place of meeting, they threw their sticks into a great pile.

The feasts of the black chimpanzees of Africa are more like those of the negroes. The animals come together, it may be, fifty at a time, leaping, shouting, and drumming on old logs with sticks which they hold in their hands and feet. They are taking their first lessons in music, as it were; and it is remarkable that that music is upon the most rudimentary form of a drum, which is, besides, the universal primitive musical instrument of the lowest savage human races, and the only one which many of them possess. Tamed monkeys can beat the drum and play with castanets.

If we may believe popular stories, the quadrumana have some kind of funeral ceremonies. The Chinese Pharmacopœia speaks of a species of which, when any one of the band dies, all the others attend his funeral. A somewhat similar story, in which the dead monkey is covered with branches of trees, is told in "Purchas's Pilgrimmes"—a work which, however, is not of the highest scientific authority. But, however exaggerated these stories may be, it is not probable that monkeys are wholly indifferent to the death of their fellows—at least