Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/32

20 that they are less concerned than those Caffres who bury only the bodies of their chiefs and their children.

Leadership among gorillas is decided by the law of the strongest. When the young gorillas become able, they put the old chiefs out of the way, and themselves take their places. So savage tribes dispatch their old men when they are no longer of use, or when they stand in the way of some ambitious aspirant. Monkeys fight by striking and clinching with their hands, and by trying to bite; they will clinch one another just as athletes do. The gorilla, coming down on its enemy, utters a cry like the war-cry of savages, and strikes upon its chest with its hands, as Houzeau says athletes frequently do. When attacked by an armed man, it aims to seize his gun or his club, and having got it tries to break it; but it does not try to use it as the man does. Other monkeys try to avoid man, but when attacked by him defend themselves courageously and throw stones and sticks at him; if they are on trees, breaking off limbs and fruits and nuts, and whatever they can put their hands upon. The primitive arms of mankind are likewise projectiles thrown by the hand like the Australian boomerang and the Indian's tomahawk, club, or lance. Free as monkeys are in throwing sticks, they do not seem to have ever come to the point of using their weapons as clubs or lances; and it is not consistent with their organization and habits that they should do so. Their fortresses are tree-tops, from which flying sticks and stones can do great execution, but to fight with clubs and lances they would have to stand upon the ground, where they would be at a great disadvantage. Both races, then, have chosen or evolved the weapons best suited to their anatomical organization. The habits of streetboys still show that man's first weapon-using instinct was to throw stones; and with this in view we can fancy the early battles when throngs of men fought by throwing showers of stones up into the trees at the monkeys, who, in their turn, threw branches down at them. Very few animals besides men and monkeys throw projectiles, but that is because they are the only ones that have prehensile hands. But elephants when angry will break down branches and pull up saplings with their trunks; and the ostrich kicks stones behind itself at the faces of its pursuers. It is the anatomical organization of the animal that determines its choice of arms.

Monkeys are susceptible of showing spontaneous preferences and friendships for others, even outside of their species, and can be, in their affections for human companions, as capricious as children. They share in man's aversion to snakes. In a state of nature they appear to manifest aversion and hostility to other animals, and particularly to other species of quadrumana. Orang-outangs exhibit an instinctive animosity against other monkeys, and assail them in every way. The tribe as a whole exhibit anger by nearly the same kind of acts as men do. A chimpanzee of Du Chaillu's had marked preferences for