The How and Why Library/Wild Animals/Section IV
IV. The Animal Acrobat and Clown[edit]
Can you think of anything that will collect a crowd of children so quickly, or keep them happy so long as an organ grinder with a monkey?
The music is often very dreadful, but the monkey is very funny. His tiny wrinkled face is so comical. It looks like that of a wise little old man who has seen a lot of trouble. Like a good clown in a circus, a monkey doesn't have to do anything to make people laugh—except just be a monkey. He is so wonderfully agile, quick and clever. He mimics everything people do. He "makes faces," he dances to music; he runs up the telegraph pole, a tree or a porch pillar, and he swings from bars like a trapeze performer. He picks up pennies, stuffs them in the pocket of his absurd red jacket, and pulls off his collar-box cap for thanks.
It seems a pity that a monkey can only chatter or scream or scold, for he tries ever so hard to talk. Such a mischief he is, too. If he sees a chance he will snatch a little girl's doll or a lady's hat and tear them in pieces. He knows very well such behavior is naughty, for he scrambles out of reach of punishment, and chuckles with glee over the trick. It's easy to forgive the little rascal, for the next instant he does something engaging. He cuddles his baby, or cracks a peanut like a squirrel, turns a hand-spring for you, or slyly pulls another monkey's tail.
Just what is a monkey?
In the big cage in a menagerie or zoo, there are a dozen or more varieties of monkeys as unlike each other as a fox terrier is unlike a St. Bernard dog. Some monkeys are as small as chipmunks, and others are as large as cocker spaniels. There are monkeys with long curly tails, with straight tails, bushy tails, stub tails, and no tails at all. Some have very hairy, and others nearly naked faces. There are dog-faced and purple-faced monkeys; monkeys with white cheeks, with turned-up noses, with tufted ears, with whiskers, mufflers and bonnets. Most of them are black, gray or some shade of brown, from silver-fawn to seal. But there are dandified monkeys with green coats and orange vests.
Many people call all the big apes—the gorillas, chimpanzees, orang-ootans, baboons and gibbons, monkeys. But we won't dothat. These huge, man-like creatures from the Old World are savage, and have to be kept separately in strong cages like other wild beasts. They are hard to catch, hard to tame, and harder to keep alive in captivity, so you will not often see one. By monkey, children always mean one of the smaller apes that can be tamed easily and led about by a string like a little dog, or kept with many others in a big room of wire netting and bars.
A monkey in captivity is happier in a cage with a number of other monkeys. "The more the merrier" is the rule in monkey land. Nearly every kind of small ape lives in a monkey village in the trees, when he is at home. There is a wise old male for a chief. He and the older males keep trespassers away from a chosen feeding place, and he leads them to a new home when they move. Early in the morning and late in the evening, seems to be play-time in a monkey town. All the monkeys leap and swing and chase each other, and "whoop and holler" as Riley says, like so many boys playing in the woods. Spoiled boys they are, too, doing a great deal of mischief by throwing down cocoanuts and other fruits and nuts, just to see them fall.
Some of these monkeys have the prettiest homes! They camp out all the year round. They love the dense woods of very hot countries, In the beautiful tropical forests along the Amazon River, in South America, monkeys live in bowers in the trees, among red and green carrots, butterfly orchid blossoms, brilliant birds and insects and flowering vines. They live in thousands of tropical islands in the sea, among palms and fruit trees. But a few are found in colder countries: in Mexico and in the mountains of India, Japan and Northern Africa, and even around the great fortress rock of Gibraltar, in Spain.
No matter how much monkeys may differ in other things, they are all alike in having four hands. The bear, the lion, the elephant, the dog—nearly all the animals you can think of, have four feet. Little girls and boys have two hands and two feet. A foot has a long sole and short toes, usually, and the toes cannot grasp and hold things. A hand has a nearly square palm, fingers much longer than toes, and a thumb. In the best kind of a hand the fingers and thumbs have three joints each, and can all be brought together in many positions, and even closed into a fist. All four of a monkey's feet, that he walks on, are really hands, with grasping fingers and more or less perfect thumbs. That is why a monkey is so clumsyon the ground. Usually he walks on the outside edges of the palms with the fingers and thumbs curled in. This gives him a funny, bow-legged look. But just watch him on a tree or a perch, or clinging to the wires of his cage. He's as much at home in a tree as a bird or a squirrel.
Even if a monkey cannot talk, he can tell you very plainly where he lived when he was at home—that is, whether he is an Old World monkey from over the ocean, or a New World monkey from South America. The monkeys in a Zoo always come to the netting when visitors appear, for they are very curious and want to see everything that is going on. Besides, they have learned that some 'specially friendly little boys and girls carry bags of peanuts. Select any little fellow who comes up to you and give him peanuts, one at a time, as fast as he can take them. If he is an Old World monkey he will stow those nuts away in cheek pouches like a squirrel. He can put a surprising number away, for those pouches stretch and stretch like little rubber balloons. Look at him carefully. His nose, of course, is flat, but the two holes are near together. And when he goes up to a bar to eat his nuts, he does not use his tail in climbing.
A South American monkey's nostrils are far apart. He has no cheek pouches, but heaps as many nuts as he can carry in his two front arms, as you carry packages. But he can keep other monkeys from taking his nuts when he climbs, for he uses his long, curly-tipped tail for a fifth hand. With five hands for grasping the South American monkey is a wonderful trapeze performer. The tree-squirrel climbs faster, the flying squirrel leaps farther, the bat clings better with his wing-hooks, but no other animal can climb, leap and swing, and go across a wide forest, forty feet from the ground without once coming to the earth. The acrobat of the animal world, he seems to be made up of wire springs that are tireless.
The South American monkey that you will see oftenest with the organ man is a small, rusty brown animal about as big as a toy terrier. He has a curved hair-covered tail, good thumbs, a rather pleasant whistling chatter, and a care-worn anxious face, as if he expected nothing in life but bad news. He is bright and obedient, so he soon learns his tricks and performs them willingly. He likes to ride on a dog's back, his master's shoulder or the barrel organ. Another favorite of the organ man's is the Capuchin monkey. You may know him by the queer way in which the hair grows around his face like a hood or Capuchin monk's cowl.Sometimes in school you learn a rule, and then the teacher will tell you that there are times when the rule doesn't work. The marmoset, the smallest and prettiest of all South American monkeys, cannot use his tail in climbing. When children see the marmoset they always cry: "Oh, what a little dear!" He is no bigger than a chipmunk. He is only eight inches long, with a furry body and a foot-long bushy tail that he carries like a plume. If it wasn't for his almost human little face and hands, and his wing-like, tufted ears, you might think him some kind of squirrel.
There is a squirrel monkey from South America only a little larger than his nut-cracking namesake. He has a gray face and a black nose, but has long hind legs so he leaps something like a kangaroo. When he is happy he shows it by grinning, and when he is hurt tears come into his eyes. In his home in the Amazon forests it rains torrents sometimes, as if the bottom had fallen out of the clouds. When caught in such a storm, a troop of these squirrel monkeys huddle together in the thickest tree they can find, and put their tails around each others' necks for company and comfort.
These marmosets and squirrel monkeys have some of the noisiest neighbors—the howling monkeys. They begin howling at sunrise, keep it up until the next sunrise, and then take a fresh start. The woods ring and echo with their howls. They travel all the time through the high branches of the trees, the males leading, and the mother monkeys following, each with one or two babies clinging to her neck with fingers and tails. They swing by their tails and catch the next limb with a hand. The brown howler is bad enough, but the red howler makes the night hideous with his cries. They screech as if all the animals in the forest were eating each other up. Some zoos won't have Little-old-man-howler, as he is called, at all.
Another South American monkey is the Saki. He has a ruddy back, and an almost human habit of cupping a hand and dipping up water when he wants to drink. He is so delicate that he seldom lives long in captivity, so you may never see him. But you are sure to see the spider monkey. He has such long slim arms and tail, and such a small body that he looks like a big, hairy spider. But really he is very gentle and even affectionate. He has little stumps of thumbs that are of little use to him, and he is not as agile as many other monkeys. A mama spider monkey likes to sit down and cuddle her baby in her arms.So many of the Old World monkeys have only little stubs and lumps of thumbs that scientists put them all into one family called the colobus or cut-off-thumb monkeys. If you see a monkey with a very fine, long-haired silky coat, particularly if he has cheek pouches and makes no use of his tail, look for shrunken little thumbs. His coat makes pretty monkey-skin collars and muffs. One colobus of the mountains of Abyssinia, where it is cold, looks as if he were wearing furs himself. He has a fringe of white down either side his jet black body, a white tippet under his chin, a white edge to his cap and a white tip to his tail.
Another colobus of the hot west coast of Africa wears the hair on top of his head in a crest, with a parting on each side, something like grandma used to comb your papa's top hair, in a long fat curl called a "roach." This crested colob looks very comical, indeed, for, beside his roach, he has whiskers under his chin. A near neighbor of his in the African jungle is the "face-maker." He is a very good-tempered, teachable little fellow. The variety of queer faces he can make always draws crowds, so he is a favorite with the organ man.
Among the brown and gray and black monkeys in a zoo, you will be sure to notice any that are brightly colored. There is a red and a purple-faced monkey; a Diana monkey, with a pretty white crescent like a new moon on the forehead, a white beard and neck scarf, and a monkey with a blue mustache above yellow whiskers. He is called the mustache monkey. The green monkey is quite a dandy. He is dressed in dark green and black, set off with dull orange whiskers, throat band, breast-plate and tail-tip.
At first sight the Hoo'noomaun monkey of the East Indies doesn't look especially interesting. He is a little grayish-brown, spider-legged animal with black hands and face. But he is a privileged being. In his native land he is sacred to Hoonoomaun, a monkey-faced god. He is never interfered with, so he goes in troops into the villages, helps himself to grain, fruits and nuts in shops and houses, and destroys things from wanton mischief. The people of India are so kind to all living creatures that several "bad boy" monkeys are very troublesome. Stories are told of a whole tribe of the Hoonoomaun or Rhesus monkeys swarming into dining rooms and eating wedding feasts. Another mischievous monkey is the magot who lives in Northwestern Africa, and in Spain around Gibraltar. He is about as big as a terrier dog. He and all his relations go to a fine garden and set sentinels in trees and on rocks to watch, while theothers eat and destroy melons, figs, grapes, oranges and almonds. An alarm sends them flying. This bad habit lands many of them in zoos and travelling shows, because traps are set for them.
The street strollers of India, Japan and Northern Africa lead about the macaque (ma-cake') or bonnet monkeys. The hair of the macaques grows in a frill around the face. These sunbonnet babies are quick and clever. One of them loves crabs so well that he has learned to swim and dive for his favorite food. The pig-tailed bonnet monkey of the East India Islands is used on plantations to climb up the tall palms, where men cannot go, to pick cocoanuts.
Now there is one very sad thing about these amusing little creatures, or rather there used to be. Tropical animals, as most of them are, they very seldom lived over the first winter in our colder country. Like human beings they got tu-ber'cu-lo'sis (consumption) or pneu-mo'nia, or some other lung trouble, and died. Steam-heated houses were built for them to live in in the winter, and every breath of cold air was shut out. They seemed to die all the faster. Every spring the monkey cage had to be restocked. When the doctors found out that people with tuberculosis often got well if they lived out of doors, even in the coldest weather, Mr. De Vry, the animal keeper in the Lincoln Park Zoo of Chicago, thought he would try the fresh-air treatment on the monkeys. One fall he fed his monkeys more good food but left them out of doors. See what happened.
They shivered and had to jump around very lively to keep warm. You know it is sometimes awfully cold in Chicago, with freezing winds and smothers of snow right from the Rocky Mountains. The monkeys lived and thrived. Their bodies grew fat, their furry coats long and thick. In the spring more than half of them were alive and well. And! Wonder of wonders!
In the cage were several mothers, each with a baby cuddled in her arms. Never before had a baby monkey been born in captivity in a cold climate. They lived, too, and frisked about as if they were in the hot forest along the Amazon, instead of on the bleak shore of Lake Michigan. In the Lincoln Park Zoo, now, are monkeys several years old; and all big zoos and menageries have learned to turn their monkeys out of doors in all kinds of weather.