PREFACE
This volume is the natural product of many years devoted by the author to studying the speech and habits of monkeys. That naturally led him up to the study of the great apes. The matter contained in this work is chiefly a record of the tabulated facts gleaned from his special field of research. The aim in view is to convey to the casual reader a more correct idea than now prevails concerning the physical, mental, and social habits of apes and monkeys and to prepare him for a wider appreciation of animals in general.
The favorable conditions under which the writer has been placed, in the study of these animals in the freedom of their native jungle, have not hitherto been enjoyed by any other student of nature.
A careful aim to avoid all technical terms and scientific phraseology has been studiously adhered to, and the subject is treated in the simplest style consistent with its dignity. Tedious details are relieved by an ample supply of anecdotes taken from the writer’s own observations. Most of the acts related are those of his own pets. A few of them are of apes in a wild state. The author has carefully refrained from abstruse theories or rash deductions, but has sought to place the animals here treated of in the light to which their own conduct entitles them, allowing the reader to draw his own conclusions.
The author frankly confesses to his own belief in the psychic unity of all animate nature. Believing in a common source of life, a common law of living, and a common destiny for all creatures, he feels that to dignify the apes is not to degrade man but rather to exalt him.
Believing that a more perfect knowledge of these animals will bring man into closer fellowship and deeper sympathy with nature, and with an abiding trust that it will widen the bounds of humanity and cause man to realize that he and they are but common links in the one great chain of life, the author gives this work to the world. When once man is impressed with the consciousness that in some degree, however small, all creatures think and feel, it will lessen his vanity and ennoble his heart.
THE AUTHOR