OF WILD ANIMALS 77 



a Very different character. Another male orang, named 

 Dohong, of the same age and intellectual caste as Rajah, 

 developed a faculty for mechanics and invention which not 

 only challenged our admiration, but also created much work for 

 our carpenters. He discovered, or invented, as you please, 

 the lever as a mechanical force, — as fairly and squarely as 

 Archimedes discovered the principle of the screw. Moreover, 

 he delighted in the use of the new power thus acquired, quite 

 as much as the successful inventor usually does. At the same 

 time, two very bright chimpanzees of his own age, and with the 

 same opportunities, discovered nothing. 



Dohong was of a reflective turn of mind, and never was 

 entirely willing to learn the things that his keepers sought 

 to teach him. To him, dining at a table was tiresomely dull, 

 and the donning of fashionable clothing was a frivolous pastime. 

 On the other hand, the interior of his cage, and his gymnastic 

 appliances of ropes, trapeze and horizontal bars, all interested 

 him greatly. Every square inch of surface, and every piece 

 of material in his apartment, was carefully investigated, many 

 times over. 



When three years old he discovered his own strength, and 

 at first he used it good-naturedly to hector his cage-mate, a 

 female chimpanzee smaller than himself. That, however, was 

 of trifling interest. The day on which he made the discovery 

 that he could break the wooden one and one-half inch horizontal 

 bars that were held out from his cage walls on cast iron brackets, 

 was for him a great day. Before his discovery was noted by the 

 keepers he had joyfully destroyed two bars, and with a broken 

 piece used as a lever was attacking a third. These bars were 

 promptly replaced by larger bars, of harder wood, but screwed 

 to the same cast-iron brackets that had carried the first series. 



For a time, the heavier bars endured; but in an evil moment 

 the ape swung his trapeze bar, of two-inch oak, far over to 

 one side of his cage, and applied the bar as a lever, inside of a 

 horizontal bar and from above. The new force was too much 



