“When they are performing twice they get four light meals a day, milk, fruit, and potatoes being their principal diet. We keep their cages very clean, but they look after their own toilets and we do not wash them.”
“What animals do you find possess the most intelligence, monkeys, dogs or horses?”
“There are clever and stupid specimens of each, but I don't think there is any great difference in general intelligence. The great difficulty with all of them is to get undivided attention.”
“What is the difference between a mandrill and an ordinary monkey?” queried Harry as he paused at the end of his reading.
“The mandrill,” said Mr. Graham, “is one of the many members of the monkey family, and belongs among the apes or the baboons. He is a native of the coast of Guinea in Africa, and has a very short tail or no tail at all; his face is furrowed, and so much resembles that of a dog, that he is often spoken of as a dog-faced monkey. A full grown mandrill is about, five feet high when standing erect, and his head is very large in proportion to his body. He is not the best looking of his race, and would never be chosen as a contestant for a prize for beauty.
“There are monkeys with tails,” continued Mr. Graham, “and monkeys without tails, and the list of each kind is so long that you couldn't remember a quarter of it if it were repeated. Generally speaking the apes, or the tailless monkeys, are more quiet in disposition than the others, and hence they are the easiest to teach and control. At best the monkey is a restless animal, and his attention cannot be kept at any one thing for more than a few moments. Mr. Brockmann justly says that the work of securing the monkey's attention is the most difficult part of his education.”
“I have read about a variety of monkey that the settlers at the Cape of Good Hope train to serve as watch-dogs,” said Harry. “Are they of the same kind as the mandrills?”