NATURAL HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA 



the bottle into the mouth, the milk was greedily 

 sucked up. When the bottles were emptied of 

 their contents, they were at once abandoned, and 

 no further notice was taken of them. 



The baby baboon is as human in its ways as any 

 human child, and has the advantage of being more 

 amusing. 



A European woman of the illiterate class, the 

 wife of a drayman at l^orth End, Port Elizabeth, 

 lost her baby when it was a few days old. She 

 developed what is commonly known as *' milk 

 fever," and a neighbour induced her to nurse a 

 little mite of a baboon which had been found cling- 

 ing to its mother's breast after she had been shot 

 when in the act of helping herself to some fruit in 

 an orchard. For months this woman suckled the 

 baby baboon, and when I saw the little fellow he 

 was robust and chubby and full of fun. The in- 

 stant a stranger approached he, with cries of alarm, 

 rushed to his foster-mother, climbed up her dress, 

 and clung to her neck, looking over his shoulder 

 with a comical expression of fear on his face. I 

 asked the woman, in jest, if she would sell him to 

 me, whereupon gleams of fierce anger shot from 

 her eyes, her face hardened, and she, with an oath, 

 ejaculated, " Sell my little darling ! No, never ! 

 not for a thousand pounds." 



The chief natural enemy of the baboon in the 

 past in South Africa was the leopard. Stealing 

 unobserved upon a troop of baboons, the leopard 

 58 



