for monkey after monkey, with head raised high and turned on one side,
could not resist taking a momentary peep into the upright bag, at the
dreadful object lying quietly at the bottom. It would almost appear as
if monkeys had some notion of zoological affinities, for those kept by
Brehm exhibited a strange, though mistaken, instinctive dread of
innocent lizards and frogs. An orang, also, has been known to be much
alarmed at the first sight of a turtle. (13. W.C.L. Martin, Natural
History of Mammalia, 1841, p. 405.)
The principle of IMITATION is strong in man, and especially, as I have
myself observed, with savages. In certain morbid states of the brain
this tendency is exaggerated to an extraordinary degree: some
hemiplegic patients and others, at the commencement of inflammatory
softening of the brain, unconsciously imitate every word which is
uttered, whether in their own or in a foreign language, and every
gesture or action which is performed near them. (14. Dr. Bateman, On
Aphasia, 1870, p. 110.) Desor (15. Quoted by Vogt, Memoire sur les
Microcephales, 1867, p. 168.) has remarked that no animal voluntarily
imitates an action performed by man, until in the ascending scale we
come to monkeys, which are well known to be ridiculous mockers.
Animals, however, sometimes imitate each other s actions: thus two
species of wolves, which had been reared by dogs, learned to bark, as
does sometimes the jackal (16. The Variation of Animals and Plants
under Domestication, vol. i. p. 27.), but whether this can be called
voluntary imitation is another question. Birds imitate the songs of
their parents, and sometimes of other birds; and parrots are notorious
imitators of any sound which they often hear. Dureau de la Malle gives
an account (17. Annales des Sciences Nat. (1st Series), tom. xxii. p.
397.) of a dog reared by a cat, who learnt to imitate the well-known
action of a cat licking her paws, and thus washing her ears and face;
this was also witnessed by the celebrated naturalist Audouin. I have
received several confirmatory accounts; in one of these, a dog had not
been suckled by a cat, but had been brought up with one, together with
kittens, and had thus acquired the above habit, which he ever
afterwards practised during his life of thirteen years. Dureau de la
Malle s dog likewise learnt from the kittens to play with a ball by
rolling it about with his fore paws, and springing on it. A
correspondent assures me that a cat in his house used to put her paws
into jugs of milk having too narrow a mouth for her head. A kitten of
this cat soon learned the same trick, and practised it ever afterwards,
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