THE LIFE OF MAMMALS 
Some of these gallant geladas had the audacity to stop a Serene Highness 
(a Duke of Saxe-Gotha) in his travels in Abyssinia .. . by rolling down 
stones in such quantity and of such a size that not only had the firing party 
to retire, but the passage of the caravan was stopped.” 
Some of these baboons are as tamable and teachable as 
other monkeys, but as they grow old they become unruly and 
Sacred subject to dangerous fits of rage. Professor Dun- 
Bahaal. — can’s treatise just referred to, and the books of 
Broderip,* Blanford,” and others record the feats of various 
learned baboons in menageries and elsewhere. They were 
tamed and trained anciently in Egypt, where a religious sect 
held the shaggy Arabian species (C. hamadryas)6 be sacred 
to Thoth, — a deity who held a similar place in their pantheon 
to that occupied by Hermes or Mercury among the Greeks or 
Romans, as god of the moon and patron of letters) 
“‘Sometimes,”’ we are told by Wilkinson, ‘‘a cynocephalus, placed on 
a throne as a god, holds a sacred ibis in his hand; and in the judgment 
scenes of the dead it frequently occurs seated on the summit of a balance, 
as the emblem of Thoth, who had an important office on that occasion, and 
registered the account of the actions of the deceased. The place where 
this animal was particularly sacred was Hermopolis, the city of Thoth. 
In the necropolis of the capital of upper Egypt a particular part was set 
apart as the cemetery of the sacred apes.” A very full and critical account 
of what the ancient Egyptians, and after them their European conquerors, 
knew and thought of these baboons, and of many other apes and monkeys 
trained by them, is contained in Anderson’s “‘Zodlogy of Egypt.” * 
Cc! The sacred baboons are large, with a straight, long, ridged 
muzzle, deeply set eyes, the face and other naked parts flesh- 
pink, and the coat ash-gray. The males have a heavy mane 
on the shoulders and long thick whiskers. Ehrenberg asserts 
that the style of wearing the hair common to the ancient people 
of the lower Nile and to the Abyssinians and Sudanese of to- 
day, was copied, as a sign of adoration, from the mane of this 
beast; and that the monumental structure in the desert near 
Cairo, the Sphinx, is modeled after the same animal god. 
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