Tested by that standard, the difference between the intelligence of the higher quadrumana—­the anthropoid apes, the baboons, and several species of the macaques—­and that of their dumb fellow-creatures is so pronounced that it amounts to a difference of kind as well as of degree. Borne, literally limited, but used in French as a synonyme of short-witted, is the term that best characterizes the actions of all other animals, as compared with the graceless but amazingly versatile and well-planned pranks of our nearest relatives.  The standard of usefulness would, indeed, degrade the perpetrators of these pranks below the rank of the dullest donkey; but as a criterion of intelligence the application of that test should rather be reversed.

Watch a colony of house-building insects, their faithful co-operation, their steady, exact adaptation of right means to a fixed purpose, and compare their activity with that of a troop of ball-playing boys.  Does not the gratuitous ingenuity of the young bipeds indicate a far higher degree of intelligence?  Does it argue against the quality of that intelligence that any novel phenomenon—­a funnel-shaped cloud, the appearance of a swarm of bats or unknown birds—­would divert the ball-players from their immediate purpose?  Monkeys alone share this gift of gratuitous curiosity.  A strange object, a piece of red cloth fluttering in the grass, may excite the interest of a watch-dog or of an antelope.  They may approach to investigate, but for subjective purposes.  They fear the presence of an enemy.  A monkey’s inquisitiveness can dispense with such motives.  In my collection of four-handed pets I have a young Rhesus monkey (Macacus Rhesus), by no means the most intelligent member of the community, but gifted with an amount of meddlesome pluck which often makes it necessary to circumscribe the freedom of his movements.  One day last spring, when he joined an assembly of his fellow-boarders on a sunny porch, the shortness of his tether did not prevent him from picking a quarrel with a big raccoon.  After a few sham manoauvres the old North American suddenly lost his temper and charged his tormentor with an energy of action that led to an unexpected result,—­for in springing back the Rhesus snapped his wire chain, and in the next moment went flying down the lane toward the open woods.  But just before he reached the gate he suddenly stopped.  On a post of the picket-fence the neighbors’ boys had deposited a kite, and the Rhesus paused.  The phenomenon of the dangling kite-tail, with its polychromatic ribbons, eclipsed the memory of his wrongs and his mutinous projects:  he snatched the tail, and with the gravity of a coroner proceeded to examine the dismembered appendage.  If he had mistaken the apparatus for a trap, the result of the dissection must have reassured him; but he continued the inquest till one of his pursuers headed him off and drove him back to his favorite hiding-place under the porch, which he reached in safety, though in the interest of science he had encumbered himself with a large section of kite-paper.