log trap.  The instinct by which a dog retraces his trail across broad rivers and through woods does not enable him to retrace the coils of a tangled rope.  A monkey’s talents, like our own, are less infallible, but more versatile, and at the possessor’s discretion can be applied and perverted to all possible purposes.  Hence also that peculiar interest which the pranks of our mischievous relatives excite even in spectators not apt to appreciate the comic features of the spectacle.  In the monkey-house of the Philadelphia Zoo I have seen saturnine burghers stand motionless for hours together, and contemplative children rapt in reveries that had little to do with the hope of witnessing a beast-fight.  They seemed to feel the spell of a secret veiled in grotesque symbols, but disclosing occasional revelations of its significance, like glimpses into the fore-world of the human race.

In the fairy-tales of the old Hindoo scriptures monkeys figure as counsellors of nonplussed heroes, and in the crisis of the Titan war the Devas themselves condescend to seek the advice of the monkey Honuman, who contrives to outwit the prince of the night-spirits.  In the international fable of “Reynard the Fox,” a she-monkey on the eve of the trial by battle suggests the stratagem that turns the scales against the superior strength of the wolf Isegrim.  The mens aequa in arduis is, indeed, a simian characteristic.  Monkeys never have their wits more completely about them than in the moment of a sudden danger, and a higher development of the same faculty distinguishes the Caucasian from all rival races, even from the sharp-witted Semites.  After the conquest of Algiers the French tried to conciliate the native element by educating a number of young Arabs and giving them a chance to compete with the cadets of St.-Cyr.  They made excellent routine-officers, but even their patron, General Clausel, admitted that they “could not be trusted in a panic.”

Dr. Langenbeck mentions a family of Silesian peasants who seemed to have an hereditary predisposition to the abnormity known as microcephalism, or small-headedness.  They were not absolute idiots, but remarkably slow-spoken and all extremely averse to active occupations.  An active disposition is generally a pretty safe gauge of mental capacity.  Intellectual vigor leads to action.  To a person of mental resources inactivity is more irksome than the hardest work, and sluggishness is justly used as a synonyme of imbecility.  Exertion under the pressure of want is, however, not incompatible with an inert disposition, and spontaneous activity, the love of busy-ness for its own sake, can be ascribed only to men and monkeys; monkeys, at least, are the only animals in whom repletion and old age cannot dampen that passion.  After a full meal an elephant will stand for hours in a sort of piggish torpor; a gorged bird seeks the tree-shade; an overfed dog and nearly every old dog becomes a picture of laziness.