MONKEY KIND. 309 



by experience, they know to be equally fraught 

 with tricks and mischief: some of them have 

 even been led to suppose, that, with a kind of 

 perverse affection, we love only creatures of the 

 most mischievous kinds ; and having seen us often 

 buy young and tame monkeys, they have taken 

 equal care to bring rats to our factors, offering 

 them for sale, and greatly disappointed at finding 

 no purchasers for so hopeful a commodity.* 



The Negroes consider these animals as their 

 greatest plague ; and, indeed, they do incredible 

 damage, when they come in companies to lay 

 waste a field of Indian corn or rice, or a planta- 

 tion of sugar-canes. They carry off as much as 

 they are able ; and they destroy ten times more 

 than they bear away. Their manner of plunder- 

 ing is pretty much like that of the baboons, al- 

 ready mentioned, in a garden. One of them 

 stands sentinel upon a tree while the rest are 

 plundering, carefully and cautiously turning on 

 every side, but particularly to that on which there 

 is the greatest danger ; in the mean time, the rest 

 of the spoilers pursue their work with great 

 silence and assiduity. They are not contented 

 with the first blade of corn, or the first cane that 

 they happen to lay their hands on j they first 

 pull up such as appear most alluring to the eye ; 

 they turn it round, examine, compare it with 

 others, and if they find it to their mind, stick it 

 under one of their shoulders. When in this man- 

 ner they have got their load, they begin to think 

 of retreating : but if it should happen that the 



Labat, Relat. de 1'Afriq. Occident p. ff!7. 



