Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/29

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THE MENTAL FACULTIES OF MONKEYS.
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with me." In many places, as in our Western cities, the liquor power is strong enough to openly defy every effort, and to push its business through the front door, regardless of law. Between the two methods, the rum-traffic has taken full possession of Sunday, and the larger half of its profits are gathered in on that day.

A still more deplorable evil has come upon the Church itself, through reliance upon the Sunday law, and through the acceptance of Sunday, which has neither Scriptural authority nor standing-room on the law of God. It has ceased to appeal to the law of God—except in a very weak way—as the source of authority in matters relative to the Sabbath, and has thereby become shorn of all real strength. Year by year the Church drifts further into the stream of Sunday desecration. The pulpit talks of the terrible disregard for Sunday which prevails, while the pews hasten out on Monday morning to pocket the profits of Sunday business and Sunday revelry. Thus, dependence on the civil law, and false theories concerning the abrogation of the Sabbath, have turned the heart of the Church itself away from the law of God, and left it to lean on a broken reed which is piercing it through.

The results are sad, but terribly real. They are legitimate, unavoidable, but none the less ruinous.

THE MENTAL FACULTIES OF MONKEYS.

By Madame CLÉMENCE ROYER.

WHEN we compare the mental faculties and social instincts of animals, even of monkeys, with those of the superior races of civilized men, the distance seems immeasurable, and to fill the gap impossible. But, if we take the lower races of mankind, the differences appear less marked, and even analogies arise. Many of the moral and mental faculties, in fact, which we observe among the quadrumana appear common to them with savage peoples on the one side, and with some of the higher mammalia on the other side, which have well-developed social instincts—with, for instance, dogs, horses, and elephants. The animals which man has domesticated are, as a rule, those which belong to social species, and live in the natural state in more or less numerous groups. And, among the monkeys, it is not the large ones, those which most resemble men in stature, that are most social and most susceptible of domestication, but the smaller ones, the tree-climbers.

The gorilla, of Western Africa, lives in patriarchal and polygamous families, in which many females and their young submit to the authority of a single adult, and the habits of the chimpanzee are similar; but the Cynocephalæ, most of the smaller species of the African.