DR. TH. NEUMANN. 199 



same difficulty as pointed out before presented itself : 

 those sounds cannot be reduced to letters and thus 

 anchored in the mind in such a way that one could re- 

 call them at leisure and compare them with others ; they 

 can be grasped only by an arbitrary effort of the memory, 

 and that is indeed overtaxing the faculties of nearly any 

 human being. 



Nevertheless, Mr. Garner could not be discouraged so 

 easily. Slowly, very slowly, he went on talking into the 

 funnel what he had heard either from the monkeys 

 themselves or from their phonographic records, over and 

 over again comparing the result of his own efforts with 

 the original sounds, until after many months of hard, 

 patient work, he found that he was able to pronounce 

 about twenty words of all those which he had recorded. 



His disappointments, however, were not yet to be at an 

 end, for when he with beating heart, tried his carefully 

 learned words for the first time on the monkeys them- 

 selves, they did not pay the slightest attention to him, or 

 behaved at least quite different from what he had a 

 right to expect. When his ear had not been able to dis- 

 cover any differences between the sounds uttered by the 

 monkeys and his own, those creatures were sensitive to 

 those most subtle distinctions and could consequently 

 not reply in the expected way. 



Another series of trials was begun. Mr. Grarner paid 

 still more attention to the most minute deviation of the 

 the sound-waves; he watched still more carefully his own 

 progress in uttering the words which he wanted to 

 master, he trained his ear better than before in order to 

 detect the slightest differences between the sounds — and 

 thus, owing to his unceasing, heroic efforts, found him- 

 self at last successful. 



He had positive proof that each sound had a meaning, 

 that with few exceptions monkeys talk with each other 

 just a^ men do, not on many subjects nor in many words, 



155 



