It is a suggestive sign of our naturalistic times that so many
first-class towns in Europe and America contemplate the establishment of
Zoological Gardens. In the United States alone five cities have
successfully executed that project. Travelling menageries have taken the
place of the mediæval pageants. Natural histories begin to supersede the
ghost-stories of our fathers. The scientific literature of four
different nations has monographs on almost every known species of beasts
and birds.
With such data of information it seems rather strange that the problem
of precedence in the scale of animal intelligence should still be a
mooted question. The primacy of the animal kingdom remains, of course,
undisputed; but the dog, the elephant, the horse, the beaver,--nay, the
parrot, the bee, and the ant,--have found learned and uncompromising
advocates of their claims to the honors of the second rank.
Russel Wallace and Dr. Brehm have agitated the question, but failed to
settle it,--even to their own satisfaction. The reason, I believe, is
that the exponents of the different theories have failed to agree on a
definite standard of comparison. The mathematical principle implied in
the construction of a honey-comb, we are told, can challenge comparison
with the ripest results of human science. The acumen of a well-trained
elk-hound, a philosophical sportsman assures us, comes nearer to human
reason than any other manifestation of animal sagacity.
Elephant-trainers, too, adduce instances that almost pass the line of
distinction between intuitive prudence and the results of reflection.
Yet if those distinctions suffice to define the difference between
reason and the primitive instincts, they should reduce the scope of the
question in so far as to make it clear that, instead of measuring the
degree of the development of special faculties of the animal mind, we
should _ascertain the direction_ of those faculties. Instinct tends to
promote the interests of the species, and is limited to the more or less
skilful, but monotonous, performance of a special task. Within that
limited sphere its competence is perfect. Reason may be often at fault,
but its capacity enlarges with practice, and the scope of its
application is unlimited. It may be exerted in the interest of the
species, of the tribe, of the family; it may devote itself to the
service of an abstract principle or subserve the purposes of individual
caprice. It differs from instinct as a piano differs from a
barrel-organ. The pianist has to master his art by years of toil, but
can apply it to all possible variations or extravaganzas of music. The
organ-grinder can delight his audience as much by his first as by his
last performance, but his _répertoire_ is limited. Reason is indefinite,
free, and versatile. Instinct is exact, but circumscribed.
Tested by that standard, the difference between the intelligence of the
higher _quadrumana_--the anthropoid apes, the baboons, and several
species of the macaques--and that of their dumb fellow-creatures is so
pronounced that it amounts to a difference of kind as well as of degree.
_Borné_, literally limited, but used in French as a synonyme of
short-witted, is the term that best characterizes the actions of all
other animals, as compared with the graceless but amazingly versatile
and well-planned pranks of our nearest relatives. The standard of
_usefulness_ would, indeed, degrade the perpetrators of these pranks
below the rank of the dullest donkey; but as a criterion of intelligence
the application of that test should rather be reversed.
Watch a colony of house-building insects, their faithful co-operation,
their steady, exact adaptation of right means to a fixed purpose, and
compare their activity with that of a troop of ball-playing boys. Does
not the gratuitous ingenuity of the young bipeds indicate a far higher
degree of intelligence? Does it argue against the quality of that
intelligence that any novel phenomenon--a funnel-shaped cloud, the
appearance of a swarm of bats or unknown birds--would divert the
ball-players from their immediate purpose? Monkeys alone share this gift
of gratuitous curiosity. A strange object, a piece of red cloth
fluttering in the grass, may excite the interest of a watch-dog or of an
antelope. They may approach to investigate, but for subjective purposes.
They fear the presence of an enemy. A monkey's inquisitiveness can
dispense with such motives. In my collection of four-handed pets I have
a young Rhesus monkey (_Macacus Rhesus_), by no means the most
intelligent member of the community, but gifted with an amount of
meddlesome pluck which often makes it necessary to circumscribe the
freedom of his movements. One day last spring, when he joined an
assembly of his fellow-boarders on a sunny porch, the shortness of his
tether did not prevent him from picking a quarrel with a big raccoon.
After a few sham manoauvres the old North American suddenly lost his
temper and charged his tormentor with an energy of action that led to an
unexpected result,--for in springing back the Rhesus snapped his wire
chain, and in the next moment went flying down the lane toward the open
woods. But just before he reached the gate he suddenly stopped. On a
post of the picket-fence the neighbors' boys had deposited a kite, and
the Rhesus paused. The phenomenon of the dangling kite-tail, with its
polychromatic ribbons, eclipsed the memory of his wrongs and his
mutinous projects: he snatched the tail, and with the gravity of a
coroner proceeded to examine the dismembered appendage. If he had
mistaken the apparatus for a trap, the result of the dissection must
have reassured him; but he continued the inquest till one of his
pursuers headed him off and drove him back to his favorite hiding-place
under the porch, which he reached in safety, though in the interest of
science he had encumbered himself with a large section of kite-paper.
On my last visit to New York I bought a female Chacma baboon that had
attracted my attention by the grotesque demonstrativeness of her
motions, and took her on board of a Norfolk steamer, where she at once
became an object of general enthusiasm. The next morning Sally was
taking her breakfast on deck, when she suddenly dropped her apple-pie
and jumped upon the railing. Through the foam of the churned brine her
keen eye had espied a shoal of porpoises, and, clinging to the railing
with her hind hands, she continued to gesticulate and chatter as long as
our gambolling fellow-travellers remained in sight.
Menagerie monkeys, too, are sure to interrupt their occupations at the
sight of a new-comer,--a clear indication that monkeys, like men,
possess a surplus of intelligence above the exigencies of their
individual needs. Yet these exigencies are by no means inconsiderable.
Unlike the grazing deer and the deer-eating panther, the frugivorous
monkeys of the tropics are the direct competitors of the intolerant lord
of creation. The Chinese macaques, the Moor monkey, the West-African
baboons, have to eke out a living by pillage. The Gibraltar monkey has
hardly any other resources. Nor has nature been very generous in the
physical equipment of the species. Most monkeys lack the sharp teeth
that enable the tiger to defy the avenger of his misdeeds. Without
exception they all lack the keen scent that helps the deer to elude its
pursuers. But their mental faculties more than compensate for such
bodily deficiencies. In the Abyssinian highlands the mornings are often
cold enough to cover the grass with hoar-frost, yet the frost-dreading
baboons choose that very time to raid the corn-fields of the natives.
They omit no precaution, and it is almost impossible to circumvent the
vigilance of their sentries. Prudence, derived from
_providence_,--i.e., prevision, the gift of fore-seeing things,--is in
many respects almost a synonyme of reason. Physically that gift is
typified in the telescopic eyes which monkeys share with a few species
of birds, but with hardly any of their mammalian relatives, except man
in a state of nature. Mentally it manifests itself in a marvellous
faculty for anticipating danger. Last summer Sally, the above-mentioned
baboon, contrived to break loose, and took refuge on the top of the
roof. I do not believe that she intended to desert, but she was bent on
a romp, and had made up her mind not to be captured by force. A chain of
eight or nine feet dangled from her girdle, and she persistently avoided
approaching the lower tier of shingles, to keep that chain from hanging
down over the edge, but was equally careful not to venture too near the
extremities of the roof-ridge, for there was a skylight at each gable.
She kept around the middle of the roof; and we concluded to loosen a few
shingles in that neighborhood and grab her chain through the aperture,
while a confederate was to divert her attention by a continuous volley
of small pebbles. But somehow Sally managed to distinguish the
hammer-strokes from the noise of the bombardment, and at once made up
her mind that the roof had become untenable. The only question was how
to get down; for by that time the house was surrounded by a cordon of
sentries. As a preliminary measure she then retreated to the top of the
chimney, and one of our strategists proposed to dislodge her by loading
the fireplace with a mixture of pine-leaves and turpentine. But better
counsel prevailed, and we contented ourselves with firing a blank
cartridge through the flue. Sally at once jumped off, but regained her
vantage-ground on the roof-ridge, and we had to knock out a dozen
shingles before one of our fourteen or fifteen hunters at last managed
to lay hold of her chain.
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.