The Speech of Monkeys. R. L. Garner

two to the box. On taking them out, he evidently missed the absent one, felt in the box, arose, and looked around where he had been sitting. Then he would put his hand into the box again and look at me; but failing to find it, he became reconciled, and began to play with the two. When he had become content with the two, I abstracted one of them, and when he failed to find it he began to search for it, and seemed quite unwilling to proceed without it. He would put the one back into the box and take it out again, as if in hope that it might find the other. I helped him to look for the missing marbles, and, of course, soon found them. When he learned that I could find the lost marbles, he would appeal to me as soon as he missed them, and in several instances he would take his little black fingers and open my lips to see if I had concealed them in my mouth, the place where all monkeys conceal what they wish to keep in safety from other monkeys, who never venture to put their fingers into one another's mouth, and when any article is once lodged in a monkey's mouth it is safe from the reach of all the tribe. I repeated this until I felt quite sure of the ability of my subject to count three, and I then increased the number of marbles to four. When I would abstract one of them, sometimes he seemed to miss it, or at least to be in doubt, but would soon proceed with his play and not worry himself about it; yet he rarely failed to show that he was aware that something was wrong. Whether he missed one from four, or only acted on general principles, I do not know; but that he missed one from three was quite evident.

      I may here add that there is a great difference in different specimens, and their tastes vary like those of human beings. The same idea is much clearer to some monkeys than it is to others, and a choice of colours much more definite; but I think that all of them assign to different numbers a difference of value. Some are talkative and others taciturn. I think I may state with safety that the Cebus is the most intelligent and talkative of all the monkeys I have known; that the Old World monkeys, as a group, are more taciturn and less intelligent than the New World monkeys, but I do not mean to include the anthropoid apes in this remark.