194 THE SPEECH OF MONKEYS. 



fessor, Mr. R. L. Grarner, announced that he had dis- 

 covered the language of monkeys. The news spread 

 lightning-like throughout the whole world, and every- 

 body seemed to ask : Is it true ? What now ? At first 

 everybody seemed convinced that the whole thing was a 

 good joke, while others very promptly declared Mr. 

 Garner a crank, a fool, an idiot. Soon they found out, 

 however, that there was nothing cranky about Mr. 

 Garner's statements, and now he was besieged by 

 scientific societies to lecture before them on this ex- 

 tremely interesting and important subject ; magazines 

 and journals applied to him for articles on his discovery, 

 and an army of reporters constantly besieged his office 

 door in order to interview him and get exhaustively the 

 latest facts, the latest phases of development of his 

 work. 



Mr. Garner was by no means reluctant to give the 

 history of his discovery and the present results of his re- 

 searches. Indeed, his approaches were slowly made, 

 and his self-preparation long. During his hard work 

 for years as a village schoolmaster he had paid most 

 attention to the study of phonetics and investigated the 

 development of human expression. Early in life, hav- 

 ing been bred on a stock farm, he conceived the childish 

 idea that horses had a language, that he could converse 

 with them, and that it was possible to exchange thoughts 

 with them, that they could understand each other. 



Why should it, therefore, be regarded as strange that 

 monkeys talk ? 



Some ten years ago Mr. Garner sat one morning in the 

 Cincinnati Zoological Garden, before a cage containing 

 a mandrill and several smaller monkeys. The former, 

 the most disagreeable creature of his kind, was the bully 

 and torment of the smaller monkeys. The cage had a 

 partition with an opening through which the smaller 

 monkeys could escape, and a box into which they could 



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