YOUNG ORANGS 275 INTRODUCTION Mr. Garner’s book needs no introduction. By this I mean that I think that no intelligent person will open into it without wishing to read more and more. The book is its own introduction. I write these lines, not so much to explain what the book is as to introduce Mr. Garner himself to people who do not know him, that they may thank him for the step forward which he has made and is making. It is hardly half a century since one of the highest authorities in the Church of England told us that animals have no rights whatever, and that men should be kind to them simply for the reason that it was desirable that men should improve their own characters. If I tied a tin pail to a dog’s tail, I injured my character. If I patted the dog on the head, I improved my character. “See all things for my use,”--this was really the motto of a book of ethics somewhat famous in its day. Happily the world has lived beyond such a crusty selfishness as this,--happily, perhaps, not for mankind only. Happily for our thought of the universe in which we live, men have found out that they have duties towards animals as they have duties towards each other,--say that in a certain sense we are the gods of animals, to whom they look up as we look up to our Father in heaven; let us, at least, treat them as we would be treated. How shall we do this? How shall we come at some understanding of their life, of their needs, of their hopes and fears? How can we be just to them? Mr. Garner has set to work in this business with systematic perseverance and a real comprehension of the position. Of all the inferior animals, these monkeys and apes, it seems, have more machinery for thought, if I may use so clumsy an expression, than have any others. The book will tell the reader why it is easier to come at some notion of the language of the Capuchin monkey than it is to apprehend the method by which the horse communicates with the horse, or the blackbird with the blackbird. With scientific precision, Mr. Garner has availed himself of this fact, is availing himself of it at the moment when I write. He has selected animals, which are certainly animals and not men. He has selected these as those where his study can be precise, and where it is most easy to arrive at correct conclusions; and it is not in the study merely of speech and of listening; it is study of what I may call the principles which underlie animal life, to which this explorer in a new field has devoted himself. The reader of this book will understand why it is that he gives up years of life to such society as that his dear little Moses gave him; why he plunges into The multitudinous abyss Where nature joys in secret bliss, that he may come at some of the secrets of those beings who are at home there.