THE LIFE OF MAMMALS 
curled up asleep, as is their custom on a windy or sunny day after a good 
swig at the maternal fount, he secures him in his merciless grip, at once lays 
hold of the stomach, and with a wrench of his powerful arms tears it open.” 
The sense of smell in this species is amazingly keen, espe- 
cially for hidden water springs in the desert. It is recorded 
that the Bushmen of the Kalahari plains used to 
train captives to help them search for water when 
famine was impending; and undoubtedly the observation of 
what roots, etc., these animals were accustomed to eat, taught the 
earliest human venturers into these regions what might be found 
there in the way of food. Le Vaillant, a French naturalist 
who wandered and wrote in South Africa from 1781 to 1785, 
had a tame chacma whose intelligent and amusing behavior 
he ascribes at length in his ‘‘ Voyage.” He says: ‘When he 
found any fruit or roots unknown to my Hottentots, we never 
touched them until my dear Kees [the 
chacma] had first tested them; if it 
refused them, we judged them to be 
cither disagreeable or dangerous, and 
threw them away.” One method 
Kees had of uprooting any plant 
which resisted an ordinary pull was 
to seize the tuft of leaves with his 
teeth as close to the ground as he 
could, then throw his heels over his 
head, givin a jerk that always suc- 
ceeded. = Sh favorite food on the 
southwest coast is that extraordinary 
plant, the Wclwitschia. Baboons also eat lizards and the like, 
and are fond of honey and certain gums. With these habits 
it is not surprising that they are everywhere exceedingly 
harmful to plantations, tearing up or trampling me more 
a 
MANDRILL, 
than they consume, and destroying a field in a night. (Hence 
they are hated and persecuted by white and negro farmers 
34 
