MONKEYS. 14] 
tropics, they congregate in numerous troops, bounding 
rapidly from branch to branch, and from tree to tree, in 
search of the fruits and eggs which constitute their 
principal means of subsistence. In the course of these 
peregrinations, which are frequently executed with a 
velocity scarcely to be followed by the eye, they seem 
to give a momentary, and but a momentary, attention to 
every remarkable object that falls in their way, but never 
appear to remember it again ; for they will examine the 
same object with the same rapidity as often as it recurs, 
and apparently without in the least recognising it as 
that which they had seen before. They pass on a 
sudden from a state of seeming tranquillity to the most 
violent demonstrations of passion and sensuality; and 
in the course of a few minutes run through all the 
various phases of gesture and action of which they are 
capable, and for which their peculiar conformation 
affords ample scope. The females treat their young 
with the greatest tenderness until they become capable 
of shifting for themselves; when they turn them loose 
upon the world, and conduct themselves towards them 
from that time forwards in the same manner as towards 
the most perfect strangers. 
The degrees of their so much vaunted intelligence, 
which is in general very limited, and rarely capable of 
being made subservient to the purposes of man, vary 
almost as much as the ever-changing outline of their 
form. From the grave and reflective Oran-Otang, whose 
docility and powers of imitation in his young state have 
been the theme of so much ridiculous exaggeration and 
sophistical argumentation, to the stupid and savage 
Baboon, whose gross brutality is scarcely relieved by a 
