The Speech of Monkeys

I secured a good record of that part of his speech which was made when near me at the front of the cage, but the remarks made while at the window were not so well recorded, yet they were audible, and I reproduced them on the phonograph at a subsequent visit. My opinion was that the sound he uttered while at the window must allude in some way to the state of the weather, and this opinion was confirmed by the fact that on a later occasion, when I repeated the record to him, the weather was fair; but when the machine repeated those sounds which he had uttered at the window on the day of the storm, it would cause him to turn away and look out of the window; while at the other part of the record he evinced but little interest, and, in fact, seemed rather to avoid the phonograph as though the sounds suggested something which he disliked. I am quite sure that the remarks which he made to me at the front of the cage were a complaint of some kind, and, from its intonation and the manner in which it was delivered, I believed that it was an expression of pain. It occurred to me that the state of the weather might have something to do with his feelings, and that he was conscious of this fact, and desired to inform me of it. About a year from that time, I became quite intimate with a feeble little monkey, which is described elsewhere by the name of Pedro, and of whose speech I made a good record. The sounds of his speech so closely resembled those made by Dago, that I was not able to see that they differed in any respect, except in loudness. Unfortunately, the cylinders containing Dago's record had been broken in shipping, and I was therefore unable to compare the two by analysis; but the sounds themselves resembled in a striking degree, and the manner of delivery was not wholly unlike, except that Pedro did not assume the same pose nor emphasise them with the same gestures.