James Forbes, in his "Oriental Memoirs," relates a striking instance of this kind. One of a shooting party had killed a female monkey in a banian tree, and carried it to his tent. Forty or fifty of the tribe soon gathered around the tent, chattering furiously and threatening an attack, from which they were only diverted by the display of the fowling-piece, whose effects they seemed perfectly to understand. But while the others retreated, the leader of the troop stood his ground, continuing his threatening chatter. Finding this of no avail, he came to the door of the tent, moaning sadly, and by his gestures seeming to beg for the dead body. When it was given, he took it sorrowfully up in his arms and carried it away to the waiting troop. That hunter never shot a monkey again.
This deep feeling for the dead is probably not common among monkeys. The gibbon, for instance, is said to take no notice of the dead. It is, however, highly sympathetic to injured and sick companions, and this feeling seems common to all the apes. No human being could show more tender care of wounded or helpless companions than has often been seen in members of this affectionate tribe of animals.
Without giving further examples of the intelligence and sympathy of the apes, we may say that they possess in a marked degree the mental powers to which man owes so much, viz. observation and imitation. The ape is the most curious of the lower animals--that is, it possesses the faculty of observation in an unusual degree. What we call curiosity in the ape is the basic form of the characteristic which we call attention or observation in man. Its seeming great activity in the ape is what might naturally be expected in an observant animal when removed from its natural habitat to a location where all around it is new and strange. Man under like circumstances is as curious as the ape, while the latter in its native trees probably finds little to excite its special attention. In both man and the ape it needs novelty to excite curiosity.
Again, the ape is imitative in a high degree. This faculty also it does not share with the lower animals, but does with man, imitation being one of the methods by which he has attained his supremacy. Observation, imitation, education, are the three levers in the development of the human intellect. The first two of these the ape possesses in a marked degree. It is susceptible also to the last, being very teachable. Education certainly exists to some extent among the apes in their natural habitat, perhaps to as great an extent as it did in primitive man. In the latter case it is doubtful if there was much that could be called designed education, the young gaining their degree of knowledge by observing and imitating their elders. The same is certainly the case among the apes.