of the dove are taken for the wings of the angels of mercy. It is evident, however, that the constant association of the tribe with gloom and darkness, with crumbling ruins and dismal caverns, and their frequent occurrence amongst the abodes of the dead, have all contributed to give strength and permanence to these feelings, and to render the entire race the objects of special aversion to the majority of mankind. And yet, with the exception of some of the larger kinds, which were utterly unknown until long after these feelings were current, the whole tribe is not only innocent and harmless, but the means of positive good. They check and keep under the teeming abundance of insect life, and thus tend to preserve that balance of nature which the Creator has rendered indispensable to the sustentation and enjoyment of the various races of his dependent creatures. CHAPTER XII. A MONOGRAPH OF THE MONKEY TRIBE-BUSY APE MEDDLING MONKEY. SOMEBODY has somewhere said that Monkeys were sent into the world to correct the follies of men. Exception may be taken to the notion, perhaps, but a great deal may be said in its favour. Our hairy friends are certainly great adepts at all sorts of mimicry, and caricature many of the foibles, failings, and petty villanies of the lords of creation to perfection. We have lately been observing their ways in our favourite haunt, the Gardens of the Zoological Society in the Regent's Park; and after spending some hours among the usual throng of holiday folk, we came away, musing whether, in good truth, an attentive study of Monkey life would not go far to compensate for the want of that great desideratum, the gift Assuredly "To see oursel's as ithers see us." "It wad frae mony a blunder free us, and, we may well add, "What airs in dress an' gait wad le'e us, Then there is this further to be said, that Monkey moralists administer their reproofs with such perfect temper and so much of drollery, that the most incorrigible offenders would certainly be moved, if not mended, by their dumb-show admonitions. We have ourselves an especial predilection for the Monkey race. It dates far back, from the time when, as" little Trotty," we were charged with the important trust of carrying the weekly halfpence to the street-door for the organ-man, who regularly came his round with a red-frocked, bespangled Monkey that 252 STAY-AT-HOME TRAVELLING. rode in state on a great white dog, and always went through his performance for the special behoof of us youngsters in front of the parlour window. Ah! what a monkey that was! there are no such monkeys now-a-days. How he danced, and waved about his plumed cap, and played on a tambourine, and fought his master with a sword, and fired off a pistol; and how we all laughed when the sly old dog would make a snap at a piece of bread pitched to him, and tumble off the Monkey from his back in the middle of the performance! But where is that Monkey now? and the organ-man? and the old dog, too? They are all gone. They have been their last round, have finished their last performance, put aside organ, tambourine, frock, and feathered cap, and quitted the scene long ago-for ever. Italian organ-men with trained Monkeys, travelling menageries with well-stocked Monkey-cages, and zoological gardens with commodious and nicely kept Monkey-houses, are all very well; but properly to appreciate the Monkeys, one has need to see them in their own proper homes, gambolling in merry troops among the wide-spreading branches and the dense foliage of tropic woods, where the peculiarities of their structure beautifully harmonize with the conditions by which they are surrounded. We have never seen them thus ourselves yet; but of course we mean to do so—that is, when we have accomplished a few other little projects of the kind previously determined on, including a summer tour in Iceland, a trip to Lake Ngami, and a voyage with one of the sperm-whalers in the South Seas. Meanwhile, however, we have been acting the part of a stay-at-home traveller, and have made our acquaintance with the Monkey world through the pages of those who have been beforehand with us in the matter of travelling. And really it is no bad way doing the business after all; for with the assistance of such writers as Humboldt, Darwin, Waterton, Schomburgh, Wallace, and others of that class, one can travel the world over without budging from his own door, and have this additional advantage, of everywhere seeing things as they are, with the keenest eyes and the most discriminating knowledge. One meets with none of the surprises and the excitement of actual travel, it is true, in this sort of book-wandering; but neither do you experience the pleasures of sea-sickness, get stung by mosquitoes, shiver with ague, go mad in a raging fever, or stand in dread of being roasted of THE MONKEY WORLD. 253 alive, to make a hot supper for some of those horrible "cannibals that each other eat, the anthropophagi." There's a compensation in all things, and in this question of study-table versus steamship, buffalo-waggon, mule's back, Indian canoe, palanquin, &c. &c. &c., much may be said on both sides. But to return to the Monkeys. We said that we have never seen them at home in their own woods. It will be understood that this statement is to be taken in its gross material sense only, not otherwise. Mentally, we have seen them, scores of times, and in very various circumstances. We have seen them sitting languidly in the hot sun, amongst the groves of mangotrees that grow around Buddhist temples and quiet Hindoo villages, where the Monkey is a sacred being, and no man's hand molests it; we have seen them, wrathful and vindictive, uttering harsh cries, and gnashing their teeth with foaming passion, as they have fled from well-armed hunters, pursuing them with deadly hatred among the steep rocks of their mountain fastnesses in Southern Africa; we have seen them, huge, hideous, and formidable, sweeping along, with flying leaps, amongst the dense woods and the swampy forests of Malacca and the islands of the Indian Ocean; swarming in chattering troops amidst the rank and luxuriant vegetation of the Senegal and the Gambia; and in the gloomy depths of those same forests traversing the ground in formidable gangs, ready to make war on man or beast. We have seen them, again, as we have glided down the great forest rivers of the New World, now peering at us furtively with their bright and searching eyes from behind the broad-leaved plantains on the banks, now bounding off into the thickets from the overhanging boughs of the mangrove-trees, while toucans and aracaris still yelped and screamed overhead, and bright green and scarlet parrots swung themselves in the sunlight on the topmost branches. In short, we have tried, though maybe we have not succeeded, to get a sight of the Monkeys wherever there were Monkeys to be seen; and now, having accomplished that part of our task, we propose, with the permission of our readers, forthwith to marshal the tribe in due order before them, and pass it, company by company, in brief review. No one needs to be told that the Monkey tribe includes other animals than those popularly known as Monkeys. Apes and Baboons belong to the tribe equally with the Monkeys properly 254 STRUCTURE OF HANDS. so called, as well also as another race of animals but little known by most people, named Lemurs. These four races, then, Apes, Monkeys, Baboons, and Lemurs, form together what we have termed the Monkey tribe, but what in the language of zoology, is the order Quadrumana, or animals with four hands. Nature, however, is not to be tied down by a name, and breaks out into irregularities quite incompatible with the arbitrary distinctions of her expounders. There is no such order as that of four-handed animals. The hand, that marvellous instrument and ready servant of the will, is the possession of man alone. The most highly developed of the so-called “hands" of the Monkeys, those of the Orang and the Chimpanzee, fall immeasurably short, in point of mobility and variety of endowment, of the human hand, of which Sir Charles Bell has written so eloquently; while, in one large section of the Monkey tribe, the opposable thumb is entirely absent from the fore pair of limbs. The extremities of the whole tribe are rather to be regarded as more or less perfectly formed grasping feet, instead of hands, and, in accordance with this view, the term Cheiropoda, or hand-footed, has been proposed as a more appropriate designation for the order than that by which it is now distinguished. But the terminology of science once agreed upon, is like the laws of the Medes and Persians, unalterable; and, remembering that the term is used with a licence, we must still speak of the whole Monkey tribe as the Quadrumana. Apes stand at the head of their order, and on the "development principle are to be regarded of course as our own immediate zoological progenitors. And there are these weighty arguments in favour of the doctrine, that, like ourselves, the Apes have no tails; they can walk almost erect, are addicted to the use of walking-sticks; and, though amiable and docile enough in youth, are apt to become excessively crusty and perverse in old age. If this be not enough to convince the reader that his remote ancestors were indubitable Apes, he had better read Mr. Darwin's Origin of Species," where he will find that the transformation of a Monkey into a man is a mere nothing to the wonders that can be brought about by "natural selection" in the "struggle for existence." Geographically, the Apes have their head-quarters in the extreme south of Asia the peninsula of Malacca, and the great islands of the Indian Ocean; though two of their number |