xn INTRODUCTION 



look up as we look up to our Father in heaven ; let us, at 

 least, treat them as we would be treated. 



How shall we do this ? How shall we come at some 

 understanding of their life, of their needs, of their hopes 

 and fears ? How can we be just to them ? 



Mr. Garner has set to work in this business with sys- 

 tematic perseverance and a real comprehension of the 

 position. Of all the inferior animals, these monkeys and 

 apes, it seems, have more machinery for thought, if I may 

 use so clumsy an expression, than have any others. The 

 book will tell the reader why it is easier to come at some 

 notion of the language of the Capuchin monkey than it is 

 to apprehend the method by which the horse communicates 

 with the horse, or the blackbird with the blackbird. With 

 scientific precision, Mr. Garner has availed himself of this 

 fact, is availing himself of it at the moment when I write. 

 He has selected animals, which are certainly animals and 

 not men. He has selected these as those where his 

 study can be precise, and where it is most easy to arrive 

 at correct conclusions ; and it is not in the study merely 

 of speech and of listening ; it is study of what I may call 

 the principles which underlie animal life, to which this 

 explorer in a new field has devoted himself. The reader 

 of this book will understand why it is that he gives up 

 years of life to such society as that his clear little Moses 

 gave him ; why he plunges into 



The multitudinous abyss 



Where nature joys in secret bliss, 



that he may come at some of the secrets of those beings 



who are at home there. 



