188 THE SPEECH OF MONKEYS. 



mental powers of animals is that they are too exclusively 

 metaphysical, constituting a logical and systematic ex- 

 position of conceptions or notions without that accurate 

 and exhaustive observation of facts which no acuteness 

 of analysis and no vigorous process of thinking can sup- 

 ply. Those investigators who denied the fact that animals 

 were unable to reason, were surely ignorant of the habits 

 and aptitudes of animals, and at the same time they 

 were liable to an opposite error, equally fatal to their 

 theories, in their tendency to ascribe to the human race 

 as a whole faculties which are characteristic of man only 

 in a high state of civilization. They ignore tlie savage 

 and the boor, and compare beasts with the most cultivated 

 and most highly developed beings, overlooking the 

 period during which man existed on the earth before he 

 even learned how to chip flints. 



These are savage tribes in which that "ideal-sense" 

 upon which peculiar stress was laid by those scientists 

 who wanted to find a psychological dividing line between 

 man and the brute, is wholly wanting, and which are as 

 destitute of historical annals as any herd of apes. Nor 

 is there any reason to believe that animals cannot com- 

 prehend facts and draw logical conclusions. Such low 

 animals as ants have been observed bringing straws from 

 a distance for the express purpose of bridging chasms 

 that separated them from a desirable article of food. A 

 striking example of this kind is related by a monk who 

 lives in a monastery in Botzen in the Tyrol. He had put 

 some pounded sugar, together with a few ants taken 

 from an ant hill in the garden, into an old inkstand, 

 which he suspended by a string from the cross-piece of 

 his window. Very soon the ants began to carry the 

 sugar along the string to their home in the garden, and 

 returned with many others which went to work in the 

 same way. After two days, although the greater part of 

 the sugar was still in the ink-stand, no ants were seen on 



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