Sally managed to distinguish the hammer-strokes from the noise of the bombardment, and at once made up her mind that the roof had become untenable.  The only question was how to get down; for by that time the house was surrounded by a cordon of sentries.  As a preliminary measure she then retreated to the top of the chimney, and one of our strategists proposed to dislodge her by loading the fireplace with a mixture of pine-leaves and turpentine.  But better counsel prevailed, and we contented ourselves with firing a blank cartridge through the flue.  Sally at once jumped off, but regained her vantage-ground on the roof-ridge, and we had to knock out a dozen shingles before one of our fourteen or fifteen hunters at last managed to lay hold of her chain.

The naturalist Lenz describes the uncontrollable grief of a Siamang gibbon who had been taken on board of a homebound English packet, where his owner tempted him with all sorts of tidbits, in the vain hope of calming his sorrow.  The gibbon kept his eye on the receding outline of his native mountains, and every now and then made a desperate attempt to break his fetters; but when the coast-line began to blend with the horizon the captive’s behavior underwent a marked change.  He ceased to tug at his chain, and, chattering with protruded lips, after the deprecatory manner of his species, began to fondle his owner’s hand, and tried to smooth the wrinkles of his coat, with the unmistakable intention of reciprocating his friendly overtures.  As soon as his native coast had faded out of view he had evidently recognized the hopelessness of an attempt at escape.  He realized the fact that he had to accept the situation, and, becoming alarmed at the possible consequences of his refractory violence, he concluded that it was the safest plan to conciliate the good will of his jailer.  From analogous observations I can credit the account in all its details, and I believe that the conduct of the captive four-hander can be traced to a mental process as utterly beyond the brain-scope of a horse, a dog, or an elephant as a problem in spherical trigonometry.

The inarticulate language of our Darwinian relatives has one considerable advantage over the articulate speech of a trained parrot:  it has a definite meaning.  Mumbling with protruded lips is an appeal for pity and affection; a coughing grunt denotes indignation; surprise is expressed by a very peculiar, sotto voce guttural; crescendo the same sound is a danger-signal which the little Capuchin-monkey of the American tropics understands as well as the African chimpanzee.  My Chacma baboon defies an adversary by contracting her eyebrows and slapping the floor with her hands.  The vocabulary of a talking bird is no doubt more extensive, but it is used entirely at random.  A first-class parrot can repeat seventy different phrases; but an English philosopher offered a hundred pounds sterling to any “mind-reader” who should succeed in guessing the seven figures in the number of a hundred-pound bank-note, and It would be as safe to offer the same sum to any bird that could furnish evidence of attaching a definite meaning to any seven of his seventy sentences.  On close investigation, the stories of conversational parrots prove as apocryphal as Katy-King legends and planchette miracles.