The naturalist Lenz describes the uncontrollable grief of a Siamang gibbon who had been taken on board of a homebound English packet, where his owner tempted him with all sorts of tidbits, in the vain hope of calming his sorrow. The gibbon kept his eye on the receding outline of his native mountains, and every now and then made a desperate attempt to break his fetters; but when the coast-line began to blend with the horizon the captive's behavior underwent a marked change. He ceased to tug at his chain, and, chattering with protruded lips, after the deprecatory manner of his species, began to fondle his owner's hand, and tried to smooth the wrinkles of his coat, with the unmistakable intention of reciprocating his friendly overtures. As soon as his native coast had faded out of view he had evidently recognized the hopelessness of an attempt at escape. He realized the fact that he had to accept the situation, and, becoming alarmed at the possible consequences of his refractory violence, he concluded that it was the safest plan to conciliate the good will of his jailer. From analogous observations I can credit the account in all its details, and I believe that the conduct of the captive four-hander can be traced to a mental process as utterly beyond the brain-scope of a horse, a dog, or an elephant as a problem in spherical trigonometry.
The inarticulate language of our Darwinian relatives has one considerable advantage over the articulate speech of a trained parrot: it has a definite meaning. Mumbling with protruded lips is an appeal for pity and affection; a coughing grunt denotes indignation; surprise is expressed by a very peculiar, sotto voce guttural; crescendo the same sound is a danger-signal which the little Capuchin-monkey of the American tropics understands as well as the African chimpanzee. My Chacma baboon defies an adversary by contracting her eyebrows and slapping the floor with her hands. The vocabulary of a talking bird is no doubt more extensive, but it is used entirely at random. A first-class parrot can repeat seventy different phrases; but an English philosopher offered a hundred pounds sterling to any "mind-reader" who should succeed in guessing the seven figures in the number of a hundred-pound bank-note, and It would be as safe to offer the same sum to any bird that could furnish evidence of attaching a definite meaning to any seven of his seventy sentences. On close investigation, the stories of conversational parrots prove as apocryphal as Katy-King legends and planchette miracles.
Causality—i.e., the gift of tracing a recondite connection of cause and effect—is another faculty which many varieties of monkeys possess in a decidedly ultra-instinctive degree. I remember the surprise of a picnic-party who had borrowed my young Rhesus and on their return tied him up on the porch of a garden-house. During the trip the little scamp had behaved with the decorum of a well-bred youth, but, finding himself unobserved, he at once made a vicious attempt to tear his rope with his teeth. Whenever his boon companions approached the porch he would resume his attitude of innocence, but as soon as they turned away, which they often did on purpose to try him, he promptly recommenced his work of destruction. Their giggling, however, excited his suspicions, and, seeing them peep around the corner, he suddenly became a model of virtuous inactivity. One of the picnickers then entered the garden-house by a rear door, to watch the little hypocrite through a crack in the board wall, while his companions ostensibly walked away and out of sight. As soon as everything was quiet. Master Rhesus went to work again, but at the same time kept his eye on the corner till he was interrupted by a tap on the wall and a mysterious voice from within, "Stop that, Tommy!" Tommy started, peeped around the corner, and looked puzzled. He was sure there was nobody in sight. How could an invisible spy have witnessed his transgression? He then scrutinized the wall more closely, discovered the crack, and dropped the rope with a curious grin, as he squinted through the tell-tale aperture. He had traced the effect to its cause.
Unlike dogs, raccoons, or squirrels, chained monkeys rarely entangle themselves: they at once notice the shortening of their tether, and never rest till they have discovered the clue of the phenomenon. A dog in the same predicament has to content himself with tugging at his chain or gnawing his rope; and the reason is that the wisdom of the wisest dog is limited to business qualifications. He is a hunter, and nature has endowed him with the requisite faculties, just as she has endowed the constructive spider and the bee. Bees and dogs share the faculty of direction, enabling them to find their way home, a talent implying a very miracle of infallible and yet unconscious intuition, and in the strictest sense a one-sided business qualification. The goose, the sturgeon, and the almost brainless tortoise possess the same gift in a transcendent degree; the oriole builds her first nest as skilfully as the last; the young bee constructs her hexagons with an ease and a uniform success that leave no possible doubt that the exercise of her talent is generically different from a function of reason. Instincts may be far-reaching enough to defy the rivalry of human science, but they resemble loophole-guns, that can be fired only in a single direction. The intuition that guides the turkey-hen to her nest does not enable her to find her way out of a half-open log trap. The instinct by which a dog retraces his trail across broad rivers and through woods does not enable him to retrace the coils of a tangled rope. A monkey's talents, like our own, are less infallible, but more versatile, and at the possessor's discretion can be applied and perverted to all possible purposes. Hence also that peculiar interest which the pranks of our mischievous relatives excite even in spectators not apt to appreciate the comic features of the spectacle. In the monkey-house of the Philadelphia Zoo I have seen saturnine burghers stand motionless for hours together, and contemplative children rapt in reveries that had little to do with the hope of witnessing a beast-fight. They seemed to feel the spell of a secret veiled in grotesque symbols, but disclosing occasional revelations of its significance, like glimpses into the fore-world of the human race.
In the fairy-tales of the old Hindoo scriptures monkeys figure as counsellors of nonplussed heroes, and in the crisis of the Titan war the Devas themselves condescend to seek the advice of the monkey Honuman, who contrives to outwit the prince of the night-spirits. In the international fable of "Reynard the Fox," a she-monkey on the eve of the trial by battle suggests the stratagem that turns the scales against the superior strength of the wolf Isegrim. The mens æqua in arduis is, indeed, a simian characteristic. Monkeys never have their wits more completely about them than in the moment of a sudden danger, and a higher development of the same faculty distinguishes the Caucasian from all rival races, even from the sharp-witted Semites. After the conquest of Algiers the French tried to conciliate the native element by educating a number of young Arabs and giving them a chance to compete with the cadets of St.-Cyr. They made excellent routine-officers, but even their patron, General Clausel, admitted that they "could not be trusted in a panic."
Dr. Langenbeck mentions a family of Silesian peasants who seemed to have an hereditary predisposition to the abnormity known as microcephalism, or small-headedness. They were not absolute idiots, but remarkably slow-spoken and all extremely averse to active occupations. An active disposition is generally a pretty safe gauge of mental capacity. Intellectual vigor leads to action. To a person of mental resources inactivity is more irksome than the hardest work, and sluggishness is justly used as a synonyme of imbecility. Exertion under the pressure of want is, however, not incompatible with an inert disposition, and spontaneous activity, the love of busy-ness for its own sake, can be ascribed only to men and monkeys; monkeys, at least, are the only animals in whom repletion and old age cannot dampen that passion. After a full meal an elephant will stand for hours in a sort of piggish torpor; a gorged bird seeks the tree-shade; an overfed dog and nearly every old dog becomes a picture of laziness. Monkeys rest only during sleep. Old age does not affect their nimbleness; they can be fattened, for I have seen baboons as sleek as seals, but, like Gibbon, Henry Buckle, and Marshal Vendôme, they prove that the energy of a strong will can bear up under such burdens. Madame de Staël, too, managed to combine a progressive embonpoint with the undiminished brilliancy of her genius, though it is certain that adipose tissue does not feed the flame of every mind. Charles Dickens in his "American Notes" expresses the opinion that no vigor of mental constitution could be proof against the influence of solitary confinement; but the narrow monkey-cages of our zoological prisons show that the minds of the little captives can stand the test of even that ordeal. They play with their shadows, if the nakedness of their four walls does not afford any other pastime.
Docility, on the other hand, is a rather ambiguous test of intelligence. The willingness and the ability to learn may supplement their mutual deficiencies, but differ as radically as patience and genius. Dogs master the tasks of their education by their earnest endeavor to please their master; Jacko excels them in spite of his waywardness. Some boys win college-prizes by memorizing their lessons in conformity with the wishes of a dreaded or beloved preceptor, others by dint of natural aptitude and a love of knowledge based on spontaneous inquisitiveness; and every circus-trainer knows that teachers who understand to avail themselves of that gift can teach a monkey tricks which can neither be coaxed nor kicked into the skull of the most docile dog. Besides, the domestic dog is a considerably modified variety of the family to which he belongs, and in order to appreciate the difference between the natural intelligence of the canines and the quadrumana we should compare the docility of the monkey with that of the wolf or the jackal. In the submissiveness of the dog the hereditary influence of several thousand generations has developed a sort of artificial instinct that qualifies him for the exigencies of his servitude; but submissiveness per se, however valuable for plastic purposes, is certainly not a characteristic concomitant of superior intelligence. In the soul of the Hindoo, the Chinese, and the Eastern Slav, the long-inculcated duty of subordination has become almost a second nature, while the most intelligent tribes of the ancient Greeks were famous—or, from a Chinese point of view, perhaps infamous—for a strong tendency in the opposite direction.
Patience is not a prominent gift of our four-handed relatives, but compensating nature has endowed them with the genius of self-help and its adjuvant talents,—observation, causality, imitativeness, covetousness, and self-asserting pluck. They also possess a fair share of such faculties as inquisitiveness, vigilance, and perseverance, all rudiments, indeed, but the rudiments of supremacy.
FELIX L. OSWALD.
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