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THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGY 



a brogue, but we could understand them. 

 What a parrot does when with his horny 

 beak he produces effective imitation of a 

 soft lip sound like "p," a primate could 

 obviously do at least as well, so far as 

 his anatomical apparatus is concerned. 

 Yet he never tries to speak, nor apparently 

 can he be induced to try, no matter how 

 close his associations with humans. 



HAVE APES A CULTURE? 



There are three historic definitions of 

 man designed to set him off functionally 

 from the other animals : man is the speak- 

 ing animal; man is a political animal; and 

 man is the tool-using animal. Other 

 phrasings, such as the fire-using or clothes- 

 wearing animal, are evidently included 

 under the more general category of tool- 

 using. We have considered the first of 

 these criteria, that of speech, and found it 

 to hold. The second definition goes back 

 to Aristotle. It has been said that, the 

 connotations of words having changed, 

 Aristotle, if he were living now and speak- 

 ing in English, would make his definition 

 run that man is a social animal. 



We still know very little as to the kind 

 of society the apes maintain in a state of 

 nature. Their behavior in captivity, with 

 dependance primarily on human beings 

 instead of fellow apes, evidently is little 

 indication. With a few exceptions, those 

 observed in captivity have been immature. 

 Natural history observations will obvi- 

 ously be extremely difficult. That the apes 

 are sociable is evident but not to the point. 

 Dogs, birds, some other species, are highly 

 sociable toward human beings. Of course 

 if man were not endowed with a gregari- 

 ous impulse he could not have developed 

 culture; but something more than gre- 

 gariousness is needed to produce culture; 

 otherwise cattle would possess it. Now it 

 is conceivable that the chimpanzee and 

 gorilla possess something more than 



sociability or personal attachments; that 

 they pass down from individual to indi- 

 vidual and from family to family certain 

 forms or patterns of relation to one 

 another — traditional group habits, which 

 may have begun to take on something of 

 the color of institutions. But that this 

 actually has happened without the pres- 

 ence of speech is difficult to conceive; 

 and there are no positive indications what- 

 ever as to the existence of such incipient 

 institutions. It would not be difficult to 

 project backward from the simpler human 

 social institutions to something that seems 

 still simpler and expectable among apes. 

 But experience has shown that such re- 

 constructions are always in part mislead- 

 ing, and quite likely to be unfounded. 

 As regards the question, then, whether 

 the apes are in any rudimentary degree 

 social animals in the sense that man is 

 institutional, we can at present answer 

 with nothing more than a question mark. 

 It may be thought that there are some 

 evidences warranting a less skeptical 

 attitude. Koehler reports that when a 

 pair of his young chimpanzees in playing 

 began to stamp and circle about a post, 

 others frequently ranged themselves in 

 line until they formed a ring, and pre- 

 sented much the appearance of a savage 

 tribe in a dance. But, while the stamping 

 of each ape was definitely heavier with 

 one foot, there was no unison — only a 

 tendency to keep time together. And 

 there was nothing to show that the danc- 

 ing followed any pattern — that there was 

 imitation in the cultural sense, with social 

 acceptance of a form. The dancing of one 

 individual stimulated other individuals 

 into analogous behavior; but the per- 

 formance of each apparently remained a 

 purely physiological response. When the 

 gamboling of one lamb sets others to 

 gamboling, or when one startled sheep 

 runs and the flock follows, the sheep do 



