WANDEROO.
Broderip used to watch one, when the Zoological Society’s collection was in its infancy in Bruton Street, and a right merry fellow was he. “He would run up his pole and throw himself over the cross-bar, so as to swing backwards and forwards as he hung suspended by the chain which held the leathern strap that girt his loins. The expression of his countenance was peculiarly innocent; but he was sly—very sly—and not to be approached with impunity by those who valued their head-gear. He would sit demurely on his cross perch, pretending to look another way, or to examine a nut-shell for some remnant of kernel, till a proper victim came within his reach; when down the pole he rushed, and up he was again in the twinkling of an eye, leaving the bare-headed surprised one, minus his hat, at least, which he had the satisfaction of seeing undergoing a variety of transformations, under the plastic hands of the grinning monster, not at all calculated to improve a shape which the taste of a Moore [the hat maker of the day], perhaps, had designed and executed. It was whispered—horrescimus referentes—that he once scalped a bishop, who ventured too near, notwithstanding the caution given to his lordship by another dignitary of the Church, and that it was some time before he could be made to give up, with much grinning and chattering, the well-powdered wig which he had profanely transferred from that sacred poll to his own. The lords spiritual of the present day, with one or two exceptions, are safe from such sacrilege. Now it would be nearly as difficult to take a wig off a bishop as it once was to take the breeches off a Highlandman. But another Wanderoo, confined in the open part of the gardens in the Regent’s Park, was of a different temperament. There was a melancholy about this creature. He would climb his pole, ascend to his elevated house-top, and there sit for half an hour together, gazing wistfully at the distant portion of the park—which presented, when viewed from his position, the appearance of a thick wood—every now and then looking down, as if he was contrasting the smooth, sharp-pointed pole, to which they fettered him, with the rugged, ‘living columns of the evergreen palaces’ of his fathers.” The Wanderoo often loses some of his tail in captivity; but it should be, when full-grown, terminated by a tuft, which, in the imagination of some, has been considered quite lion-like. Having large cheek-pouches, this Monkey, very un-lion-like in disposition, feeds rather rapidly, and stores away much for future occasion. In doing this it either carries the food to the mouth with the hand or places its mouth to the object. It moves on all-fours, and has callosities; and these, and the tail, give it a very baboon-like appearance. Nothing is known of their habits in their wild state.
The geographical range of the Inui, or Macaques, is very great, and some of the twenty-seven species of which the genus is composed have very restricted wandering grounds, whilst others are found over a wide extent of country. As a group, they are found from North Africa to China, and species are met with at Gibraltar and Eastern Tibet, and within range of the everlasting snow. They are found in the peninsulas of India, and in the great islands as far south-west as Timor and in the Philippines, but not in Celebes or in New Guinea.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE DOG-SHAPED MONKEYS (continued). THE BABOONS.[60]
Early Accounts of the Baboon—Origin of the Name—Held as Sacred by the Egyptians—Used as the Emblem of Thoth—Brought into Europe in the Middle Ages—Their Literature—General Description of the Family—Structural Peculiarities—Brain—Skull—Geographical Distribution—[THE SACRED BABOON]—Found in Great numbers in Abyssinia—Formidable Antagonists—Size and Colour of the Male and Female—Anecdotes—Propensity for Spirituous Liquors and Thieving—[THE GELADA BABOON]—[THE PIG-TAILED BABOON]—Usually called Chacma—Description of it—Its Ferocity in Captivity—Le Vaillant’s Monkey—[THE SPHINX BABOON]—Its Dexterity of Aim—[THE ANUBIS BABOON]—Its Locality and Food—Method of Running—[THE COMMON BABOON]—Often found in Captivity—Anecdotes—Anatomical Peculiarities
JOHN LEO, an ancient traveller, who wrote about his perils and adventures in “his nine bookes,” says, regarding his experience of Africa, that “of Apes there are divers and sundry kinds, those which have tayles being called in the African tongue Manne, and those which have none Babuini. They are found in the woods of Mauritania, and upon the mountains of Bugia and Constantia. They live upon grasse, and come and goe in great companies to feed in the cornfields; and one of their companie, which standeth centinelle or keepeth watch and ward upon the borders, when he espyeth the husbandmen comming he cryeth out, and giveth, as it were, an alarm to his fellows, who every one of them flee immediately into the next woods, and betake themselves to the trees. The shee Apes carry their whelpes upon their shoulders, and will leape with them in that sort from one tree to another.”
This author, although he probably mixed up other Monkeys with his Babuini, gives the key to the derivation of the word baboon, which has been the subject of keen controversy amongst those who are curious in such matters. Papio is the common term applied to these animals by the writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: it is “dog latin” for Babbo, which in modern language would be rendered Papa, and Babuino is the diminutive of Babbo. Doubtless these terms bear some important and hidden reference to the opinions of the African races upon their relationship and connection with the clever Apes, and upon their appreciation of the paternal habits of the patriarchs of the great companies who not only stand “centinelle,” but instil good discipline into the younger members of the family.
But long before John Leo lived, these Babuini had been noticed and critically observed by Greek and Roman naturalists, and had received, on account of their especial character—their dog-shaped muzzle and head—the name Cynocephali, or Dog-headed Apes. The word comes from the Greek, and was frequently applied to Dog-headed people as well as Apes, and it is very applicable, for the whole aspect of the head, and especially of the prolonged snout, cut short at the end in the Ape, greatly resembles that of some Dogs. Earlier still, the ancient Egyptians engraved its figure in stone, made metal images of it, drew it on papyrus, and even made mummies of their dead bodies. Hermopolis was especially the city devoted to the worship of the Dog-headed, for in those early days such was their grandeur in Egyptian eyes, and such the folly of mankind. Symbolism was carried to an excess, its foundations being as mysterious as meaningless, and it therefore came to pass that the Dog-headed were mixed up with literature and astronomy.
That admirable investigator and popular exponent of the sculptures and hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians, Sir Gardner Wilkinson, writes that “The Cynocephalus Ape, which was particularly sacred to Thoth, held a conspicuous place among the sacred animals of Egypt, being worshipped as the type of the god of letters, and of the moon, which was one of the characters of Thoth. It was even introduced into the sculptures as the god himself, with ‘Thoth, Lord of Letters,’ and other legends inscribed over it; and in astronomical subjects two Cynocephali are frequently represented standing in a boat before the sun, in an attitude of prayer, as emblems of the moon. Their presence in a similar boat with a Pig probably refers to them as types of the divinity, in whose honour that animal was sacrificed; the moon and Bacchus, according to Herodotus, being the sole deities to whom it was lawful to immolate Swine, and that only at the full moon. But the presence of Cynocephali was not confined to Thoth or the moon. On two sides of the pedestals of the obelisks of Luxor four Cynocephali stand in the same attitude, as if in adoration of the deity to whom those monuments were dedicated; a balustrade over the centre doorway of the temple of Amun at Medinet-Aboo is ornamented with the figures of these animals; and a row of them forms the cornice of the exterior of the great temple dedicated to Ra at Aboomubel. Sometimes a Cynocephalus placed on a throne as a god holds a sacred Ibis in its hand; and in the judgment-scenes of the dead it frequently occurs seated on the summit of the balance as the emblem of Thoth, who had an important office on that occasion, and registered the account of the actions of the deceased. The place where this animal was particularly sacred was Hermopolis, the city of Thoth. Thebes and the other towns also treated it with the respect due to the representative of the Egyptian Hermes, and in the necropolis of the capital of Upper Egypt, a particular spot was set apart as the cemetery of the sacred Apes. Mummies of the Cynocephalus were put up in a sitting posture, which is usually that given to the animals in the sculptures when representing the god Thoth; and its head forms one of the covers of the four sepulchral vases deposited in the tombs of the dead. It was then the type of the god Hopi, one of the four genii of Amenti, who was always figured with the head of a Cynocephalus. Many of this species of Ape were tamed and kept by the Egyptians, and the paintings show that they were even housed for useful purposes.”