The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal ObservationsHornaday, William T. (William Temple)
Science
The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations
Hornaday, William T. (William Temple)
Animal behavior
[Illustration caption: THE LEVER THAT OUR ORANG-UTAN INVENTED, AND
THE WAY HE APPLIED IT By W. A. Camadeo, in the "Scientific
American," 1907]
In due time, Dohong tested his lever upon the bars with their new
brackets, and at first they held securely. Then he engaged Polly,
his chimpanzee companion, to assist him to the limit of her
strength. While Dohong pulled on the lever, Polly braced her
absurd little back against the wall, and pushed upon it, with all
her strength. At first nothing gave way. The combined strength
exerted by the three brackets was not to be overcome by prying at
the horizontal bar itself. It was then that Dohong's inventive
genius rose to its climax. He decided to attack the brackets
singly, and conquer them one by one. On examining the situation
very critically, he found that each bracket consisted of a right-
angled triangle of wrought iron, with its perpendicular side
against the wall, its base uppermost, and its hypotenuse out in
the air. Through the open centre of the triangle he introduced the
end of his trapeze bar, chain and all, as far as it would go, then
gave a mighty heave. The end of his lever was against the wall,
and the power was applied in such a manner that few machine screws
could stand so great a strain. One by one, the screws were torn
out of the wood, and finally each bracket worked upon was torn
off.
But there was one exception. The screws of one bracket were so
firmly set in a particularly hard strip of the upright tongued-
and-grooved yellow pine flooring that formed the wall, the board
itself was finally torn out, full length! The board was four
inches wide, seven-eighths of an inch thick, and seven feet long.
Originally it was so firmly nailed that no one believed that it
could be torn from its place. [Footnote: In the Winter of 1921
about a dozen newspapers in the United States published a
sensational syndicated article, occupying an entire page, in which
all of Dohong's lever discovery and cage-wrecking performances
were reported as of recent occurrence, and credited to a stupid
and uninteresting young orang called Gabong, now in the Zoological
Park, that has not even the merit of sufficient intelligence to
maintain a proper state of bodily uprightness, let alone the
invention of mechanical principles.]
Without delay, Dohong started in with his lever to pry off the
remaining boards of the wall, but this movement was promptly
checked. Our next task consisted in making long bolts by which the
brackets of the horizontal bars were bolted entirely through the
partition walls and held so powerfully on the other side that even
the lever could not wreck them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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