The late Mr. Broderip, in his Zoological Recreations, tells us that Mazurier, after a long and patient attendance upon the monkeys domiciled in the Jardin du Roi, sewed up in skins, and with a face painted and made up in a concatenation accordingly, raised at last the benevolence of a tender-hearted one to such a pitch, that it offered him a bit of the apple it was eating, and drew from him that rapturous exclamation, pregnant with the consciousness of his apparent identity with the monkey-character—“Enfin! enfin, je suis singe!”—(At length! at length, I have become a monkey.)
Poor Mazurier! when he died, Polichinelle was shipwrecked indeed! We can see him now gaily advancing, as if Prometheus had just touched the wood with his torch, in a brilliant cocked hat of gilt and silvered pasteboard, with rosettes to match, gallantly put on athwart ships; that very pasteboard, so dear to recollection as having glittered before our delighted eyes when old nurse unfolded the familiar little books of lang-syne—books which in these philosophical days are shorn of their beams; for Cock Robin, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and his Bean-stalk, The Children in the Wood, The Seven Champions, Valentine and Orson, with the other dearly-beloved legends of our childhood, when permitted to enter the nursery, are more soberly clad: their splendid and many-coloured attractive coats have almost entirely disappeared.
Mazurier was the personification of that invincible Prince of Roués, Punch; but if the comic strength of this elastic, this indian-rubber man lays in Polichinelle, it was in The Ape of Brazil that his tragic power lay—and that power, absurd as the expression may seem to those who never beheld him, was great. There was but one blot in his inimitable performance. It was perfect as a piece of acting; but, alas! Mazurier had dressed the character without a tail. The melodrama was admirably got up; but there, to the great distress of zoologists, was the tailless quadrumane in the midst of Brazilian scenery, where no traveller—and travellers are proverbial for seeing strange things—has ever ventured to say that he saw a monkey without that dignifying appendage. How true is it that wisdom—such wisdom as it is—brings sorrow; all the rest of the world were in ecstasies; the zoologists shook their heads, and the scene ceased to affect them.
Be it remembered henceforth by the getters-up of monkey melodramas, that all the monkeys of the New World yet discovered rejoice in tails; the anthropoid apes of the Old World have none.
But tailed or tailless, this amusing order of mammiferous animals has always been, and ever will be, regarded by the million with feelings of mingled interest and disgust. Every one is irresistibly attracted by the appearance and tricks of a monkey—very few leave the scene without something like mortified pride at the caricature held up to them. The zoologist regards the family with an interest proportioned to their approximation to man; but he knows that their apparent similarity to the human form vanishes before anatomical investigation; and that, although there may be some points of resemblance, the distance between the two-handed and the four-handed types, notwithstanding all the ingenious arguments of those philosophers who support the theory of a gradual development from a monad to a man, is great.
A modern zoologist has, not inaptly, applied the term Cheiropeds or hand-footed animals to this group; and, indeed, strictly speaking, they can hardly be called quadrumanous or four-handed. Their extremities, admirably fitted for grasping and climbing, as far as their arboreal habits require those actions, fall short—how very far short!—of that wonderful instrument which surrounds a being born one of the most helpless of all creatures, with necessaries, comforts, and luxuries, and enables him to embody his imaginings in works almost divine. We look in vain among the most perfectly-formed of the anthropoid apes for the well-developed opposable thumb of the human hand—that great boon, the ready agent of man’s will, by means of which he holds “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowls of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
The hands of the monkeys are at best but “half made up,” and they are generally more or less well fashioned in proportion to the greater or less prehensile development of the tail. The habits of the race, as we have already hinted, are arboreal, and their favourite haunts are the recesses of those tropical forests where they can either sport in the sunbeams on the topmost boughs, or shelter themselves from its scorching rays under the impervious canopy of a luxuriant vegetation. When their privacy is invaded by man, a restless and constantly recurring curiosity seems to be their prevailing feeling at first, and at last the intruders are frequently pelted with stones, sticks, and fruits heavy and hard, more especially if they make any demonstration of hostility.
Robert Lade thus speaks of their behaviour when he went to hunt some of them near the Cape:—
“I can neither describe all the arts practised by these animals, nor the nimbleness and impudence with which they returned after being pursued by us. Sometimes they allowed us to approach so near them, that I was almost certain of seizing them; but when I made the attempt, they sprung, at a single leap, ten paces from me, and mounted trees with equal agility, from which they looked with great indifference, and seemed to derive pleasure from our astonishment. Some of them were so large, that if our interpreter had not assured us that they were neither ferocious nor dangerous, our number would not have appeared to be sufficient to protect us from their attacks. As it would serve no purpose to kill them, we did not use our guns” (we respect the good feeling of honest Robert and his companions); “but the captain happened to aim at a very large one which sat on the top of a tree, after having fatigued us a long time in pursuing him. This kind of menace, however, of which the animal perhaps recollected his having sometimes seen the consequences, terrified him to such a degree, that he fell down motionless at our feet, and we had no difficulty in seizing him. But whenever he recovered from his stupor it required all our dexterity and efforts to keep him. We tied his paws together; but he bit so furiously that we were under the necessity of covering his head with our handkerchiefs.”
Indeed, those who have only seen these agile creatures in menageries, or in a reclaimed state, can have no idea of the wild activity of the tribe in their native woods. Swinging and leaping from tree to tree, ever on the hunt for fruits and birds’ nests—they are most unconscionable plunderers of eggs—they lead a merry life, which is, however, often cut short by those mighty snakes that frequently lie in ambush near their careless, unsuspecting prey. These serpents are the greatest enemies of the monkeys, with the exception of the common persecutor—man. He, indeed, is sometimes touched by compunctious visitings, when it is too late.