THE SPEECH OF MONKEYS. I 7 I 



from a vowel basis. This opinion is further con- 

 firmed by the fact that the sounds produced by 

 the types of the animal kingdom lower than the 

 monkey appear to be more like the sounds of 

 pipe instruments, and as we rise in the scale the 

 vocal organs appear to become somewhat more 

 complex and capable of varying their sounds so 

 as to give the effect of consonants, which very 

 much extends the vocal scope. The present 

 state of the speech of monkeys appears to have 

 been reached by development from a lower form. 

 Each race or kind of monkey has its own peculiar 

 tongue, slightly shaded into dialects, and the 

 radical sounds do not appear to have the same 

 meaning in different tongues. The phonetic 

 character of their speech is equally as high as that 

 of children in a like state of mental development, 

 and seems to obey the same laws of phonetic 

 growth, change, and decay as human speech. It 

 appears to me that their speech is capable of 

 communicating the ideas that they are capable 

 of conceiving, and measured by their mental, 

 moral, and social status, is as well developed as 

 the speech of man measured by the same unit. 

 Strange monkeys of the same species seem to 

 understand each other at sight, whereas two 



