59 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



mana after the degree of that relationship : no naturalist could name 

 the most man-like ape. It is a reticulated rather than a graduated 

 system of affinity, as Carl Vogt expresses it ; the type of the human 

 form is a center from which the connecting lines diverge in various 

 directions. To every supposed characteristic of our physical structure 

 some genus or other of the multiform family has been found to exhibit 

 a parallel ; only the combination of these attributes distinguishes man 

 from all monkeys. 



The Latin word simia is derived from simus (fiat-nosed), and -/Elian 

 considered the prominence of the human nose as a prerogative of our 

 species ; but Sir Stamford Raffles discovered a nose-ape, the Bornean 

 representative of the genus Semnopithecus, a big, long-tailed brute, 

 with a truly Roman proboscis and the narrow nostrils of the Cauca- 

 sian race. In proportion to his size, the white-handed capuchin-monk- 

 ey of Western Guiana has a higher forehead than the two-legged in- 

 habitants of his native woods ; and the anatomist Camper demonstrated 

 that, with respect to the length of the tail-bones, immortal man forms 

 the connecting link between the lower apes and the orangs. The Arabs, 

 who question the human pedigree of the beardless Ethiopian, would 

 have to hail the wonderoo as a man and a brother ; and the male 

 orang-outang, too, can boast of a chin-tuft that would do credit to a 

 modern senator. 



It would, indeed, be a mistake to suppose that all monkeys are nat- 

 urally mischievous. The little Tamarin {Midas rosalia) handles its 

 playthings more carefully than most children, and the females, espe- 

 cially, seem almost afraid to stir without their keeper's permission. 

 Gratuitous destructiveness is rather a distinctive trait of the African 

 quadrumana, and their representative in this respect is, perhaps, the 

 Cercopithecus maurus, the Moor-monkey, or monasso, as they call him 

 in Spain, a fellow who seems to consecrate his temporal existence to 

 mischief with an undivided and disinterested devotion. This maurus 

 and his cousin, the rock-baboon, are the terror of the Algerian farmer ; 

 but the baboon contents himself with filling his belly, while the other 

 tears off twenty ears of corn for one he eats, and often enters a fig- 

 garden for the exclusive purpose of stripping the trees of their leaves 

 and unripe fruit. In captivity he can not be trusted even with a 

 leather jacket, and, finding nothing else to spoil, does not hesitate to 

 exercise his talent upon his younger relatives, to the detriment of .their 

 woolly fur. Still, his intelligence and restless activity make him a prime 

 favorite of the fun-loving Spanish sailors, and in the Andalusian sea- 

 ports every larger household has a monasso or two mo?ios de cadena, 

 "chain-monkeys," as the dealers call them, a Moor-monkey and a 

 cadena being as necessary concomitants in civilized regions as a king 

 and a constitution. A rupture of the concatenation creates an alarm, 

 as if the chained beast of the Apocalypse had broken loose, and, if an 

 unchained monasso gets a five minutes' chance at a kitchen or a parlor, 



