e
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