Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/361

Rh disadvantages, and the two Africans in their lattice prison are today probably the stoutest fourhanders with an equal record of long captivity in any country of the temperate zone.

The calorific ingredients of their diet may help them to survive the long winter nights, but a female baboon which escaped from a private menagerie in the neighborhood of Tallulah Falls, Georgia, in the fall of 1886, accomplished the same feat on a menu of grass seeds and persimmons, and during a heavy snowfall in December starved like a Mexican school teacher rather than run the risk of forfeiting the luxury of freedom by approaching a farmstead. She was recaptured by a hunter, or rather by his hounds, the next month, but fought like a catamount, and her second escape in March caused an excitement as if the chained beast of the Apocalypse had broken loose. Her peculiar tracks in the snow and in the sand of the river shore (where she used to turn over flat stones in quest of crawfish) often put hounds on her trail, but she always contrived to reach "tall timber" ahead of her pursuers, till she met her Waterloo during a sleet-storm in April, when the combined effects of cold and hunger had modified the prehensile vigor of her four hands. The hounds killed her and ripped her shaggy coat into shreds, but dissection revealed the fact that her lungs were almost as sound as those of a mountain buck, the only mementos of her confinement being three small cysts of atrophied tubercles.

In his native haunts the chimpanzee rivals the vigor of any fourhanded or fourfooted creature of his size, and there can be no doubt that the secret of his failure to survive removal to the higher latitudes is not his sensitiveness to cold air currents, nor his impatience of confinement, but his expensiveness, and the consequent reluctance of his jailers to expose him to atmospheric influences which would save his life, but which a deep-rooted delusion still dreads as the harbinger of death.

More than fifty years ago Dr. Friedberger, of Vienna, appears to have suspected that relation of cause and effect in the case of the Duke of Reichstadt, the son of the first Napoleon.

"You have saved so many consumptives," said one of the doctor's colleagues, "don't you see any chance to help poor R.?"

"It's a sadly peculiar case," said the specialist; "as an ordinary mortal he might pull through, but as the son of a demigod I fear he is doomed."

"What! do you think the Government would—"

"Oh, hush! No such idea. But, you see, his life is extra valuable, and for that very reason his ill-advised friends are extra strict in the enforcement of the precautions that will stifle his vital vigor."