It is not ill deeds alone that are done because the means to do them are in sight. The same is true of good deeds also. The elephants [179] ]can help each other better than most quadrupeds, because they have trunks; and so can the monkeys, because they have hands. Herein lay the primitive germ of society. Indeed there is profit in remembering this, for it follows that selfish greed, which is the root of gambling and theft of every kind, is a reversion in the scale of being, not merely to the monkey level, but far below it, to the level of the cats and fishes.
Be the explanation what it may, the mutual helpfulness of monkeys is well ascertained. They could hardly survive in the woods on other terms. A male baboon in Egypt has been seen to turn and face some dogs, and protect and deliver a young baboon in danger of succumbing to them. Here the remarkable thing is that it was the male that did it. Many females would fight for their young. Maternal love is the taproot of life; but the root of society is family solidarity. That the poor “dog-faced” baboon of old Egypt, unaltered for 6000 years, is able to rise so high in the social scale as this, is perhaps what is best worth knowing about him.
The leopard is the great enemy of monkeys of all kinds. This may be said to be true “all the world over,” if the American jaguar is called a kind of leopard, as it sometimes is. So it is with [180] ]special pleasure that one reads of an incident seen in Africa not long ago by Sir J. Percy Fitzpatrick. It occurs in the standard biography of his dog, Jock of the Bushveld, pp. 270, 271, 272, and it happened to a leopard that narrowly missed dining upon the hero, “Jock,” and so cutting short his distinguished career. Jock’s master, apparently, was a-hunting, and saw the leopard pinning a baboon with its left paw in the bottom of a stony glen; but before it could do more, a host of angry baboons descended the rocks towards it, with an uproar that even to a Fitzpatrick seemed deafening; and upon the leopard, which had one paw occupied, they “showered loose earth, stones, and debris of all sorts down with awkward underhand scrapes of their forepaws” (meaning their hands). Nearer and nearer they came, while the leopard vainly threatened them with its free forepaw. Louder and louder grew the uproar. The baboons, like old Cato and the Chinese, believed in shouting and grimacing to frighten the foe; and here they practised that. Neither Cato nor any Chinese warrior could surpass a monkey in twisting the features. The artist who tried to represent their contortions in Sir Percy’s book has done his best, but could not succeed. It is “like painting fire,” as Carlyle once said.
[181] ]The leopard became alarmed. It is an Indian proverb that the tigers do not count the sheep; but the baboon is not so negligible. The corpses of a chimpanzee and a lion, it has been reported (but not by Sir Percy), have been found interlocked, the chimpanzee having been disembowelled, and the lion throttled. The leopard could not know that. I confess I have doubts of the truth of the history myself. But the leopard had misgivings as the noisy crowd came nearer and nearer, and let his victim go. Sir Percy watched the triumphant baboons depart. “The crowd scrambled up the slope again,” he reports, and he tells us he believed, and so may we, what “all the Kafirs maintained, that they could see the mauled one dragged along by its arms by two others, much as a child might be helped uphill....”
It is a likely guess that the fighting baboons were the adult males of the tribe. This is a guess suggested by another interesting bit of history.
3. THE INDIAN BABOONS AND THE BEAR
Dr Murphy, now civil surgeon at Maubin, in the delta of Burma, where this is written, is a unique phenomenon. That is a [182] ]clumsy phrase to apply to any fellow-creature, but accurate. He is a perfectly popular European official—popular in spite of being an official, because he is a good doctor, spontaneously sympathetic, kind and helpful, and does not bully or grab.
Two little facts may be told on the authority of the present Deputy Commissioner of Maubin district and his predecessor, to give Dr Murphy the pleasure of seeing himself as others see him, and to give strangers a glimpse of him. In 1908, when he was about to go away on sorely-needed sick leave, the good people of Maubin town, who did not realise how ill he was, got up a petition to the effect that Dr Murphy’s leave should be refused, as Maubin town could not possibly dispense with him. When he was expected to return in 1909, the Deputy Commissioner hastened to Rangoon to solicit that Dr Murphy might be posted again to Maubin. That was how he came to be in Maubin this year (1909), when he told me three pretty anecdotes, which, knowing him well, I retell now with as much confidence as if I had seen and heard with my own eyes and ears everything he told me he saw and heard.
In 1883 he and his brother were schoolboys at Mussoorie in the Himalayas; and were in the [183] ]habit of frequenting a glen where lived a tribe of Indian baboons, “langurs” the people name them. These are “black-faced, white-whiskered, long-tailed, big, grey monkeys, not by any means as tall as a man, but as thick in the arm.” They are a different species from the African baboons, but quite as clannish. They live on terms of neutrality with mankind, as the various tribes of men may be said to live with each other; that is to say, open hostilities are strictly avoided on both sides, and stealing is restricted to what can be done in secret. In this instance, as the stealing is all on one side, it might be said they levied tribute upon men, but they do not attack people. School children at Simla have told this writer that the “wild” baboons often sit and watch them, they and the children eyeing each other with equal curiosity.
Of course, they are not Quakers, nor even Hindus. If people flung stones at them, they would fling stones in return. The little brown fisher monkey of Burma, too, will do that. But “in deference to Hindu prejudices,” the English leave them alone, so that they have probably never noticed the English. They pay no taxes, these white-whiskered gentlemen; and reciprocate human forbearance. “Live and let live,” is their rule with [184] ]men, and so, in general, schoolboys hardly notice them.