CHIMPANZEES AND ORANG-UTANS. 287 



are painted black inside. The trial consists of placing quickly all 

 the blocks in their corresponding hollows. The actual time required 

 by an adult human being is about twenty seconds. It is strange 

 that with so quick a memory for the shapes of the letters and the 

 keys she should find so much difficulty in mastering the form-board. 

 After hundreds of trials she is never certain to get all ten blocks 

 in place without considerable hesitation and one or two misfits. The 

 more elaborate they are in shape the easier it appears to be for her 

 to place them ; the five point star is almost always her first selection 

 from the pile and seldom does she hesitate over it ; the equilateral 

 cross is likewise readily placed, but the simple square, the oblong and 

 the lozenge are invariably shifted from one hole to another all over 

 the board. The shortest time in which she has placed them all 

 correctly, so far, is 35 seconds ; and the very next trial may have 

 taken 2^ minutes. 



I do not wish to generalize, but from my experience with a very 

 bright chimpanzee and an exceptionally receptive orang-utan I 

 should say that the ability to recognize the significance of graphic 

 representation is as lacking in the anthropoid mind as is the inclina- 

 tion to speak. The crudest scrawls of the cave dwellers are hun- 

 dreds of centuries ahead of the simian thought. I have spent hours 

 trying to get my anthropoids to draw two crossed lines on a black- 

 board. If the board be placed lying flat on the floor in front of 

 them they will draw horizontal lines with the swing of the arm. if 

 the board be placed upright they draw nearly perpendicular lines 

 merely as the weight of the arm carries the chalk down. With 

 pencil and paper they make nothing but scrawling zig-zags with no 

 method in their madness, and no amount of copy set or guiding of 

 their hands will induce them to do otherwise. They have, however, 

 a decided sense of color. Both of them have been taught to know 

 red, blue and yellow by name and the chimpanzee can select and 

 place in separate piles blocks colored violet, blue, green, yellow, 

 orange and red. 



In testing their color sense I tried first with a red, a blue and a 

 yellow block and a board whereon were painted squares of the same 

 colors a little larger than the blocks ; I showed them over and over 

 again what I wanted them to do and saying the names of the colors 



