The Tower Menagerie : $b comprising the natural history of the animals contained in that establishment; with anecdotes of their characters and history.Bennett, Edward Turner
History
The Tower Menagerie : $b comprising the natural history of the animals contained in that establishment; with anecdotes of their characters and history.
The degrees of their so much vaunted intelligence, which is in general
very limited, and rarely capable of being made subservient to the
purposes of man, vary almost as much as the ever-changing outline of
their form. From the grave and reflective Oran-Otang, whose docility and
powers of imitation in his young state have been the theme of so much
ridiculous exaggeration and sophistical argumentation, to the stupid
and savage Baboon, whose gross brutality is scarcely relieved by a
single spark of intelligence, the gradations are regular and easy. A
remarkable circumstance connected with the developement of this faculty,
or perhaps we should rather say, with its gradual extinction, consists
in the fact that it is only in young animals which have not yet attained
their full growth, that it is capable of being brought into play; the
older individuals, even of the most tractable races, entirely losing the
gaiety, and with it the docility, of their youth, and becoming at length
as stupid and as savage as the most barbarous of the tribe.
The Monkeys of the Old and of the New World differ from each other in
several remarkable points, some of which are universally characteristic
of all the species of each, while others, although affording good and
tangible means of discrimination, are but partially applicable. Thus
the nostrils of all the species inhabiting the Old World are anterior
like those of man, and divided only by a narrow septum. In those of the
New World, on the contrary, they are invariably separated by a broad
division, and consequently occupy a position more or less lateral. In
the former again the molar teeth are uniformly five in number, crowned
with obtuse and flattened tubercles; while in the latter they are either
six in number, or in the few anomalous cases in which they are limited
to five, and which are peculiar to a group that ought to occupy an
intermediate station between the Monkeys and the Insect-eating Carnivora,
their crowns are surmounted by sharp and somewhat elevated points. The
tails of all the American Monkeys are of great length, but they differ
more or less from each other in the power of suspending themselves by
means of that organ, a faculty which is nevertheless common to the
greater number of them, and of which those of the Old World are entirely
destitute. On the other hand the American species never exhibit any
traces of the callosities or of the cheek-pouches, which are so common
among the Asiatic and African races.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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