OF WILD ANIMALS 63 



about, peering far up into the faces of passers-by for sympathy, 

 but all the time furtively and shrinkingly watching its tor- 

 mentor. Every now and then the hairy old tramp would jerk 

 the monkey's cord, each time giving the frail creature a violent 

 bodily wrench from head to foot. I think that string was 

 jerked about forty times every hour. 



And that exhibition of monkey torture in a monkey hell 

 continues in summer throughout many states of our country, 

 — because "it pleases the children!" The use of monkeys 

 with hand-organs is a cruel outrage upon the monkey tribe, and 

 no civilized state or municipality should tolerate it. I call 

 upon all humane persons to put an end to it. 



As an antidote to our vaulting human egotism, we should 

 think often upon the closeness of mental contact between the 

 highest animals and the lowest men. In drawing a parallel 

 between those two groups, there are no single factors more 

 valuable than the home, and the family food supply. These 

 hark back to the most primitive instincts of the vertebrates. 

 They are the bedrock foundations upon which every species 

 rests. As they are stable or unstable, good or bad, so lives 

 or dies the individual, and the species also. 



In employing the term "highest animals" I wish to be 

 understood as referring to the warm-blooded vertebrates, and 

 not merely the apes and monkeys that both structurally and 

 mentally are nearest to man. 



Throughout my lifetime I have been by turns amazed, 

 entertained and instructed by the marvelous intelligence and 

 mechanical skill of small mammals in constructing burrows, and 

 of certain birds in the construction of their nests. Today the 

 hanging nest of the Baltimore oriole is to me an even greater 

 wonder than it was when I first saw one over sixty years ago. 

 Even today the mechanical skiU involved in its construction 

 is beyond my comprehension. My dull brain can not figure out 

 the processes by which the bird begins to weave its hanging 

 purse at the tip end of the most unstable of all earthly building 



