On the moral side, the possibility of the dog’s becoming a humorous beast looks more promising. He certainly exhibits rudiments of feelings and mental attitudes which {162} seem in man to be closely related to a reflective humour. As the inner circle of his human friends know, he can be terribly bored. I saw, not long since, a small dog undergoing the process of chaining by his mistress before she took him into a shop. He drew a long yawn, and his appearance was eminently suggestive of a keen sense of the absurdity of the shopping habits of ladies, a sense which only wanted the appropriate utterance to become a mild, tolerant kind of satire. Yet one must be mindful of one’s own warning against a too hasty interpretation of such actions. We may now turn to animals much nearer ourselves in the zoological scale. Among monkeys we obtain, undoubtedly, something more closely akin to our smile and laugh. Darwin has made a careful inquiry into the similarities between the two. He tells us that some of the essential features of the facial expression during a laugh, the drawing backwards of the corners of the mouth, the formation of wrinkles under the eyes, etc., are “characteristic and expressive of a pleased state of mind in various kinds of monkeys”.[95] With respect to laughter-like sounds, Darwin gives us several pertinent facts. A young chimpanzee will make a kind of barking noise when he is pleased by the return of any one to whom he is attached, a noise which the keeper interprets as a laugh. The correctness of this interpretation is confirmed by the fact that other monkeys utter a kind of “tittering sound” when they see a beloved person. A young chimpanzee when tickled under the armpits produces a more decided chuckling or laughing sound. “Young ourangs, also, when tickled will make a chuckling sound and put on a grin.” It has been found by Dr. L. Robinson that the young of {163} the anthropoid apes are specially ticklish in the regions of the surface of the body which correspond with the ticklish regions in the case of the child. Not only so, a young chimpanzee will show great pleasure when tickled, rolling over on his back and abandoning himself to the pastime, much as a child does. When the tickling is prolonged he resembles a child further by defending ticklish spots. So, too, does a young ourang. It may be added that young apes, like many children, make a pretence of biting when tickled. To sum up: the young of the higher apes have something resembling our smile and laugh, and produce the requisite movements when pleased. Their attempt at laughter, as we might be disposed to regard it, appears as a sign of sudden joy in circumstances in which a child will laugh, _e.g._, on the reappearance of a beloved companion after a considerable interval. It further occurs when the animal is tickled, along with other manifestations which point to the existence of a rudiment of the child’s capacity for fun and for the make-believe of play.