[Three Hundred Animals Contents]
ARE bred in many countries, and are of various sorts and sizes. There are some in the East Indies most beautifully spotted. This tribe is less in stature than the apes and baboons, but do more mischief as they generally unite in great numbers for the sake of devastating a plantation, or of attacking and annoying some fiercer creatures, which they force away from their haunts by teazing and pelting them in all ways imaginable. Their natural food is vegetables, likewise fruit of all sorts, corn, and even grass; but when domesticated, they learn to eat of all what is served on our tables. They are often seen in our streets, the unwelcome riders of the patient bear, and excite laughter by their cunning, and their tricks. It has been a folly to suppose that Apes and Monkeys were degenerated men; the least knowledge of anatomy, and the inspection of their inward frame, is sufficient to decide the point.
“First rudiment of man, when Nature sat,
And turn’d the plastic wheel and docile clay,
In search of better shapes and fairer forms
Worthy to stand proud Reason’s noble shrine,
The Ape, the lively Monkey, still approves
In form, in shape and gestures quaint, a man
In miniature, – but Reason dwells not there.”
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The Mona, Green, and Fair Monkeys, represented above, are small species of the same class, and have all a long grasping tail, very useful to them when playing and jumping from branch to branch in the plantations of canes and cocoa-trees.