for a time against the caravan. It deserves notice that these baboons
thus acted in concert. Mr. Wallace (41. The Malay Archipelago, vol.
i. 1869, p. 87.) on three occasions saw female orangs, accompanied by
their young, breaking off branches and the great spiny fruit of the
Durian tree, with every appearance of rage; causing such a shower of
missiles as effectually kept us from approaching too near the tree. As
I have repeatedly seen, a chimpanzee will throw any object at hand at a
person who offends him; and the before-mentioned baboon at the Cape of
Good Hope prepared mud for the purpose.
In the Zoological Gardens, a monkey, which had weak teeth, used to
break open nuts with a stone; and I was assured by the keepers that
after using the stone, he hid it in the straw, and would not let any
other monkey touch it. Here, then, we have the idea of property; but
this idea is common to every dog with a bone, and to most or all birds
with their nests.
The Duke of Argyll (42. Primeval Man, 1869, pp. 145, 147.) remarks,
that the fashioning of an implement for a special purpose is absolutely
peculiar to man; and he considers that this forms an immeasurable gulf
between him and the brutes. This is no doubt a very important
distinction; but there appears to me much truth in Sir J. Lubbock s
suggestion (43. Prehistoric Times, 1865, p. 473, etc.), that when
primeval man first used flint-stones for any purpose, he would have
accidentally splintered them, and would then have used the sharp
fragments. From this step it would be a small one to break the flints
on purpose, and not a very wide step to fashion them rudely. This
latter advance, however, may have taken long ages, if we may judge by
the immense interval of time which elapsed before the men of the
neolithic period took to grinding and polishing their stone tools. In
breaking the flints, as Sir J. Lubbock likewise remarks, sparks would
have been emitted, and in grinding them heat would have been evolved:
thus the two usual methods of obtaining fire may have originated. The
nature of fire would have been known in the many volcanic regions where
lava occasionally flows through forests. The anthropomorphous apes,
guided probably by instinct, build for themselves temporary platforms;
but as many instincts are largely controlled by reason, the simpler
ones, such as this of building a platform, might readily pass into a
voluntary and conscious act. The orang is known to cover itself at
night with the leaves of the Pandanus; and Brehm states that one of his
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