On my last visit to New York I bought a female Chacma baboon that had attracted my attention by the grotesque demonstrativeness of her motions, and took her on board of a Norfolk steamer, where she at once became an object of general enthusiasm.  The next morning Sally was taking her breakfast on deck, when she suddenly dropped her apple-pie and jumped upon the railing.  Through the foam of the churned brine her keen eye had espied a shoal of porpoises, and, clinging to the railing with her hind hands, she continued to gesticulate and chatter as long as our gambolling fellow-travellers remained in sight.

Menagerie monkeys, too, are sure to interrupt their occupations at the sight of a new-comer,—­a clear indication that monkeys, like men, possess a surplus of intelligence above the exigencies of their individual needs.  Yet these exigencies are by no means inconsiderable.  Unlike the grazing deer and the deer-eating panther, the frugivorous monkeys of the tropics are the direct competitors of the intolerant lord of creation.  The Chinese macaques, the Moor monkey, the West-African baboons, have to eke out a living by pillage.  The Gibraltar monkey has hardly any other resources.  Nor has nature been very generous in the physical equipment of the species.  Most monkeys lack the sharp teeth that enable the tiger to defy the avenger of his misdeeds.  Without exception they all lack the keen scent that helps the deer to elude its pursuers.  But their mental faculties more than compensate for such bodily deficiencies.  In the Abyssinian highlands the mornings are often cold enough to cover the grass with hoar-frost, yet the frost-dreading baboons choose that very time to raid the corn-fields of the natives.  They omit no precaution, and it is almost impossible to circumvent the vigilance of their sentries.  Prudence, derived from providence,—­i.e., prevision, the gift of fore-seeing things,—­is in many respects almost a synonyme of reason.  Physically that gift is typified in the telescopic eyes which monkeys share with a few species of birds, but with hardly any of their mammalian relatives, except man in a state of nature.  Mentally it manifests itself in a marvellous faculty for anticipating danger.  Last summer Sally, the above-mentioned baboon, contrived to break loose, and took refuge on the top of the roof.  I do not believe that she intended to desert, but she was bent on a romp, and had made up her mind not to be captured by force.  A chain of eight or nine feet dangled from her girdle, and she persistently avoided approaching the lower tier of shingles, to keep that chain from hanging down over the edge, but was equally careful not to venture too near the extremities of the roof-ridge, for there was a skylight at each gable.  She kept around the middle of the roof; and we concluded to loosen a few shingles in that neighborhood and grab her chain through the aperture, while a confederate was to divert her attention by a continuous volley of small pebbles.  But somehow