Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885

Eben had been fishing the day before.

Eben, who was a friendly young man, looked at her pityingly as he put the' fish into her basket. As she was turning away in unwonted silence, he was moved to say, "I wouldn't take it so hard if I was you, Miss Daggett. You're well rid of such a scamp. And maybe they'll catch him and get the money back. La, now! you don't say you hain't heard?" he exclaimed at sight of Miranda's astonished face. "They most generally do get the news up to the poor-house." Eben lifted his hat and ran his fingers through his hair with a mingling of sympathy and pleasure in being the first to impart important news. "He's cleared out, the book-agent has,—got all the money he could of folks without giving 'em any books; and folks say he got some of you. He's been in jail for playing the same trick before; and folks think he'll be caught this time."

"Oh, it's a mistake! He'll come back," said Miranda dejectedly, after a moment's thought.

"Well, he isn't very likely to, because"—here Eben turned his head aside in embarrassment—"because he's got a wife and family over to Olneyville."

Radiant delight overspread Miranda's countenance.

"I hope they'll just let him go," she said. "He's welcome to what money he's got of mine,—more'n welcome." And homeward she went with a light step.

"Women are queer," mused Eben, as he returned to his fish-cleaning.

"She's lost her beau and her money, and she's tickled to death."

"I declare, you look just as fresh and young and happy as you did fifteen years ago!" said the widow, with a touch of envy, as they sat down at the cheerful breakfast-table.

Miranda touched Mrs. Bemis's arm as she came out of the meeting-house the next Sunday, Ephraim's boys, preternaturally smooth of hair and shining of face, beside her.

"If it ain't perfane to say it. Mis' Bemis, I feel as if I'd got through the eye of that needle clear into the kingdom of heaven."

The poor-mistress commented upon the saying in the midst of her numerous family that night: "She's got that selfish, tempery woman saddled onto her for life, and she'll work her fingers to the bone for them boys, that ain't anything to her, and won't be apt to amount to much,—for there never was one of them Spencers that did,—and she calls that the kingdom of heaven!"

"It's jest as I always told you," remarked Cap'n 'Kiah placidly. "It's all owin' to the p'int of view."

SOPHIE SWETT.

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THE SECOND RANK

A ZOOLOGICAL STUDY

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.

FELIX L. OSWALD.

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ELUSIVE

Just out of reach she lightly swings,
My Psyche with the rainbowed wings,
A floating flower, by winds impelled,
The honeyed spray has caught and held.
Now circling low, with grace divine,
She sips the tulip's chaliced wine.
Why should I seek to bring her nigh
And find—a simple butterfly?

O isles in ocean's azure set,
Like sculptured dome and minaret
Your purpled cliffs and headlands rise
Against the far-off, misty skies.
Yet, thither borne by helpful breeze,
As lifts the veil from circling seas,
Well know I your enchanted land
Would prove but rugged rock and sand.

O friend whose words of wisdom rare
Inspire my soul to do and dare,
Across the distance wide and drear
I will not reach to bring you near.
Why cast ideal grace away
To find you only common clay?
The best of life and thought and speech
Is that which lies—just out of reach.

    SARAH D. HOBART.
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