It is not ill deeds alone that are done because the means to do them
are in sight. The same is true of good deeds also. The elephants can
help each other better than most quadrupeds, because they have trunks;
and so can the monkeys, because they have hands. Herein lay the
primitive germ of society. Indeed there is profit in remembering this,
for it follows that selfish greed, which is the root of gambling and
theft of every kind, is a reversion in the scale of being, not merely
to the monkey level, but far below it, to the level of the cats and
fishes.
Be the explanation what it may, the mutual helpfulness of monkeys is
well ascertained. They could hardly survive in the woods on other
terms. A male baboon in Egypt has been seen to turn and face some
dogs, and protect and deliver a young baboon in danger of succumbing
to them. Here the remarkable thing is that it was the male that did
it. Many females would fight for their young. Maternal love is the
taproot of life; but the root of society is family solidarity. That
the poor "dog-faced" baboon of old Egypt, unaltered for 6000 years, is
able to rise so high in the social scale as this, is perhaps what is
best worth knowing about him.
The leopard is the great enemy of monkeys of all kinds. This may be
said to be true "all the world over," if the American jaguar is called
a kind of leopard, as it sometimes is. So it is with special pleasure
that one reads of an incident seen in Africa not long ago by Sir
J. Percy Fitzpatrick. It occurs in the standard biography of his dog,
_Jock of the Bushveld_, pp. 270, 271, 272, and it happened to a
leopard that narrowly missed dining upon the hero, "Jock," and so
cutting short his distinguished career. Jock's master, apparently, was
a-hunting, and saw the leopard pinning a baboon with its left paw in
the bottom of a stony glen; but before it could do more, a host of
angry baboons descended the rocks towards it, with an uproar that even
to a Fitzpatrick seemed deafening; and upon the leopard, which had one
paw occupied, they "showered loose earth, stones, and debris of all
sorts down with awkward underhand scrapes of their forepaws" (meaning
their hands). Nearer and nearer they came, while the leopard vainly
threatened them with its free forepaw. Louder and louder grew the
uproar. The baboons, like old Cato and the Chinese, believed in
shouting and grimacing to frighten the foe; and here they practised
that. Neither Cato nor any Chinese warrior could surpass a monkey in
twisting the features. The artist who tried to represent their
contortions in Sir Percy's book has done his best, but could not
succeed. It is "like painting fire," as Carlyle once said.
The leopard became alarmed. It is an Indian proverb that the tigers do
not count the sheep; but the baboon is not so negligible. The corpses
of a chimpanzee and a lion, it has been reported (but not by Sir
Percy), have been found interlocked, the chimpanzee having been
disembowelled, and the lion throttled. The leopard could not know
that. I confess I have doubts of the truth of the history myself. But
the leopard had misgivings as the noisy crowd came nearer and nearer,
and let his victim go. Sir Percy watched the triumphant baboons
depart. "The crowd scrambled up the slope again," he reports, and he
tells us he believed, and so may we, what "all the Kafirs maintained,
that they could see the mauled one dragged along by its arms by two
others, much as a child might be helped uphill...."
It is a likely guess that the fighting baboons were the adult males of
the tribe. This is a guess suggested by another interesting bit of
history.