Happily the world has lived beyond such a crusty selfishness as this,—happily, perhaps, not for mankind only. Happily for our thought of the universe in which we live, men have found out that they have duties towards animals as they have duties towards each other,—say that in a certain sense we are the gods of animals, to whom they look up as we look up to our Father in heaven; let us, at least, treat them as we would be treated.
How shall we do this? How shall we come at some understanding of their life, of their needs, of their hopes and fears? How can we be just to them?
Mr. Garner has set to work in this business with systematic perseverance and a real comprehension of the position. Of all the inferior animals, these monkeys and apes, it seems, have more machinery for thought, if I may use so clumsy an expression, than have any others. The book will tell the reader why it is easier to come at some notion of the language of the Capuchin monkey than it is to apprehend the method by which the horse communicates with the horse, or the blackbird with the blackbird. With scientific precision, Mr. Garner has availed himself of this fact, is availing himself of it at the moment when I write. He has selected animals, which are certainly animals and not men. He has selected these as those where his study can be precise, and where it is most easy to arrive at correct conclusions; and it is not in the study merely of speech and of listening; it is study of what I may call the principles which underlie animal life, to which this explorer in a new field has devoted himself. The reader of this book will understand why it is that he gives up years of life to such society as that his dear little Moses gave him; why he plunges into
The multitudinous abyss
Where nature joys in secret bliss,
that he may come at some of the secrets of those beings who are at home there.
Mr. Garner does not ask himself, and I do not propose that the reader shall ask, what changes may ensue in the trade of the world from his discovery. He does not pretend that there will be more palm oil, or more Manila hemp, because we understand monkeys and apes and gorillas and orangs better than our fathers. But he believes, and those who have followed him with sympathy believe, that we shall know more of ourselves, that we shall know more of the universe in which we live, that we shall know more of God, the I Am, who is the life of this universe, than our fathers knew, if this brave explorer is able to carry on farther such investigations as this book describes.
May his life be prolonged for such study; it has been long enough now for us to owe him a large debt of gratitude for the lifelong sacrifice and determination with which he has prosecuted these studies thus far.
EDWARD E. HALE.
October 26, 1900.