The fox, the wolf, and their companions, were introduced as instruments of satire, on account of their peculiar characters; but there were other animals which were also favourites with the satirist, because they displayed an innate inclination to imitate; they formed, as it were, natural parodies upon mankind. I need hardly say that of these the principal and most remarkable was the monkey. This animal must have been known to our Anglo-Saxon forefathers from a remote period, for they had a word for it in their own language--_apa_, our _ape_. Monkey is a more modern name, and seems to be equivalent with maniken, or a little man. The earliest _Bestiaries_, or popular treatises on natural history, give anecdotes illustrative of the aptness of this animal for imitating the actions of men, and ascribe to it a degree of understanding which would almost raise it above the level of the brute creation. Philip de Thaun, an Anglo-Norman poet of the reign of Henry I., in his _Bestiary_, tells us that "the monkey, by imitation, as books say, counterfeits what it sees, and mocks people:"-- _Li singe par figure, si cum dit escripture, Ceo que il vait contrefait, de gent escar hait._[32] He goes on to inform us, as a proof of the extraordinary instinct of this animal, that it has more affection for some of its cubs than for others, and that, when running away, it carried those which it liked before it, and those it disliked behind its back. The sketch from the illuminated manuscript of the Romance of the Comte d'Artois, of the fifteenth century, which forms our cut No. 61, represents the monkey, carrying, of course, its favourite child before it in its flight, and what is more, it is taking that flight mounted on a donkey. A monkey on horseback appears not to have been a novelty, as we shall see in the sequel. [32] See my "Popular Treatises on Science written during the Middle Ages," p. 107. [Illustration: _No. 61. A Monkey Mounted._]