Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/34

22 will divide their trinkets among one another, or quarrel about them, and dress themselves up in them in a grotesque style; and then, like children, having become tired of them, will leave them hanging on the branches or let them fall to the ground, and care no more for them. They seem to be thieves by instinct, for the mere pleasure of stealing, when they are not catering to their appetites; and they are capable of sacking a house and carrying off everything movable in it with the system and concert of a band of robbers. They observe a kind of discipline in their operations, and post their scouts, to inform them in season when it is time to run away; and this, when warned, they can do with wonderful simultaneousness.

Uiloa saw monkeys joining hands, six or eight together, to ford rivers. Dampier tells a very interesting story of the performances in this line of the monkeys of the Isthmus of Panama. We can see monkeys repeating the same exercise on a small scale for amusement in zoölogical gardens.

Travelers say that monkeys take up those of their number which are wounded in their battles. Savage observed the same thing done for chimpanzees when they were shot, and says that, when the wound does not immediately produce death, his fellows have been seen to put their hands over it to stop its bleeding, and, if this did not succeed, to apply leaves and sod. Houzeau relates an analogous story on the authority of the New-Hebrides islanders.

As men appropriate particular territories to themselves to the exclusion of all others, so the larger monkeys will drive away other animals from grounds they wish to occupy, with an efficiency that speaks well for their discipline and tactics.

The acuteness of the perception of domestic animals to approaching danger is well known. Monkeys exhibit it in an equal degree. Le Vaillant says that the bavian which went with him into Africa was his most trustworthy guardian, and signalized the approach of the slightest danger, whether by day or by night, even before the dogs could discover it; while the dogs acknowledged it their superior in this faculty, and at its look or nod would spring to this side or that, according as it indicated. The same monkey, though tamed, would answer the cries of the wild ones of its species when it heard them in the woods, but was afraid of them when it saw them. All travelers testify to the intelligence of monkeys in a wild state, and have much to say of the trouble they have in guarding against their devices. It is not considered safe to attack their troops, for they will defend themselves in concert and with energy, and in apparent security, from the tree-tops, where they are afraid of nothing but a gun.

The curiosity of animals is not always passive, and the attentive attitude they show is not always the effect of astonishment. They like to imitate, and to imitate they must observe. An orang-outang in the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris, being one day visited by Flourens