DODO, THE JULIET OF THE TRIBE
During my stay in New York the past winter, I have been frequently entertained by a like speech from little Dodo, who was the Juliet of the Simian tribe. She belonged to the same species as the others, but her oratory was of a type far superior to that of any other of its kind that I have ever heard. At almost any hour of the day, at the approach of her keeper, she would stand upright and deliver to him the most touching and impassioned address. The sounds which she used, and the gestures with which she accented them, as far as I could determine, were the same as those used by Dago and Pedro in their remarks to me as above described, except that Dodo delivered her lines in a much more impressive manner than either of the others. DODO AND HER KEEPERI asked the keeper to go into the cage with me, and see if he could take her into his hands. We entered the cage, and after a little coaxing she allowed him to take her into his arms, and after caressing her for a while, and assuring her that no harm was meant, she would put her slender little arms about his neck, and cuddle her head up under his chin like an injured child. She would caress him by licking his cheeks and chattering to him in a voice full of sympathy, and an air of affection worthy of a human being. During most of this time she would continue her pathetic speech without a moment's pause, and was not willing under any conditions to be separated from him. The only time at which she would ever show any anger at me, or threaten me with assault, would be when I would attempt to lay hands on her keeper, or release him from her warm embrace. At such times, however, she would fly at me with great fury, and attempt to tear my very clothes off, and on these occasions she would not allow any other inmate of the cage to approach him, or to receive his attention or caresses. The sounds which she uttered were pitiful at times, and the tale she told must have been full of the deepest woe. I have not been able up to this time to translate these sounds literally, but their import cannot be misunderstood. My belief is that her speech was a complaint against the inmates of the cage, and that she was begging her keeper not to leave her alone in that great iron prison, with all those big, bad monkeys, who were so cruel to her. One reason for believing this to be the nature of her speech, is that in all cases where I have heard this speech and seen these gestures made, the conditions were such as to indicate that such was its nature. It has, however, every appearance of love-making of the most intense type. It is quite impossible to describe fully and accurately the sounds, and much more so the gestures, made on these occasions, so that the reader would be impressed as with the real act and speech. Dodo would stand erect on her feet, cross her hands on her heart, and in the most touching but graceful manner go through with the most indescribable contortions; she would sway her body from side to side, turn her head in the most coquettish manner, and move her folded hands dramatically, while her face would be adorned with a Simian grin of the first order, and the soft, rich notes of her voice were perfectly musical. She would bend her body into every graceful curve that can be imagined, move her feet with the grace of the minuet, and continue her fervent speech as long as the object of her admiration appeared to be touched by her appeals. Her voice would range from pitch to pitch and from key to key, and, with her arms folded, she would glide across the floor of her cage with the grace of a ballet girl; and I have seen her stand with her eyes fixed upon her keeper, and hold her face in such a position as not to lose sight of him for a moment, and at the same time turn her body entirely around, in her tracks, with the skill which no contortionist has ever attained. MONKEYS SHED TEARSDuring these orations I have observed the little tears standing in the corner of her eyes, which indicated that she herself must have felt what her speech was intended to convey. These little creatures do not shed tears in such abundance as human beings do, but they are real tears, and are doubtless the result of the same causes that move the human eyes to tears.
It has been my experience that these sounds appeal directly to our better feelings. What there is in the sound itself I cannot say, but it touches some chord in the human heart which vibrates in response to it. It has impressed me with the thought that all our senses are like the strings of some great harp, each one having a certain tension; so that any sound produced through an emotion would find response in that chord which is in unison with it. Indeed, I have thought that our emotions and sensations may be like the diatonic scale in music, and that the organs through which they act may respond in tones and semitones, and that each multiple of any fundamental tone will affect the chord in unison with it, like the strings upon a musical instrument. The logical deduction thence would be, that our sympathies and affections are the chords, and our aversions and contempt the discords, of that great harp of passion.
CHAPTER VII.
Interpretation of Words—Specific Words and Signs—The Negative Sign and Sounds—Affirmative Expressions—Possible Origin of Negative and Positive Signs.
In my intercourse with these little creatures, I cannot forget how often I have caught the spirit of their tones when no ray of meaning as mere words of speech had dawned upon me, and it is partly through such means that I have been able to interpret them. As a rule, each act of a monkey is attended by some sound, and each sound by some act, which, to another monkey of the same species, always means a certain thing. There are many cases, perhaps, in which acquired words or shades of dialect are not quite clear to them, just as we often find in human speech; but monkeys appear to meet this difficulty and overcome it, just as men do. They talk with one another on a limited number of subjects, but in very few words, which they frequently repeat if necessary. Their language is purely one of sounds, and while those sounds are accompanied by signs, as a rule, I think they are quite able to get along better with the sounds alone than with the signs alone. The rules by which we may interpret the sounds of Simian speech are the same as those by which we would interpret human speech. If you should be cast away upon an island inhabited by some strange race of people whose speech was so unlike your own that you could not understand a single word of it, you would watch the actions of those people and see what act they did in connection with any sound they made, and in this way you would gradually learn to associate a certain sound with a certain act, until at last you would be able to understand the sound without seeing the act at all; and such is the simple line I have pursued in the study of the speech of this little race—only I have been compelled to resort to some very novel means of doing my part of the talking. Since I have been so long associated with them, I have learned to know in many cases what act they will perform in response to certain sounds; and as I grow more and more familiar with these sounds, I become better able to distinguish them, just as we do with human speech.
SPECIFIC TERMS
Until recently, I have believed that their sounds were so limited in number as to preclude any specific terms in their vocabulary; but now I am inclined to modify this opinion somewhat, as I have reason to believe that they have some specific terms—such as a word for monkey, another word for fruit, and so on. They do not specify, perhaps, the various kinds of monkeys; but monkeys in general, in contradistinction to birds or dogs. Their word for fruit does not specify the kind, but only means fruit in a collective sense, and only as a kind of food. I am not positive as yet that their specific terms may even go so far as this, but I infer that such may be the case from one fact which I have observed in my experience. When I show a monkey his image in a mirror, he utters a sound on seeing it, especially if he has been kept away from other monkeys for a long time; and all monkeys of the same species, so far as I have observed, under like conditions use the same sound and address it in the same way to the image in the glass. In a few instances I have seen strange monkeys brought in contact with each other, and have observed that they use this same sound on their first meeting. The sound is always uttered in a low, soft tone, and appears to have the value of a salutation. When kept in a cage with other monkeys, they do not appear to salute the image in the glass, but chatter to it, and show less surprise at seeing it than in cases where they have been kept alone for some time.
In cases where monkeys have been fed for a long time on bread and milk, or on any one kind of food, when a banana is shown him he uses a sound which the phonograph shows to differ slightly from the ordinary food sound. I have recently had reason to suspect that this difference of inflection somewhat qualifies the sound, and has a tendency to make it more specific. The rapidity with which these creatures utter their speech is so great that only such ears as theirs can detect these very slight inflections. I am now directing my observations and experiments to this end, with the hope that I may determine with certainty in what degree they qualify their sounds, by inflections or otherwise. I have observed that in the phonograph the sounds which formerly appeared to me to be the same are easily distinguished when treated in the manner described in the second part of this work, where I describe at length some of my experiments with this wonderful machine.