Title: The American Museum journal
Identifier: americanmuseumjo18amer (find matches)
Year: c1900-(1918) (c190s)
Authors: American Museum of Natural History
Subjects: Natural history
Publisher: New York : American Museum of Natural History
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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673 THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL should say that monkeys probably make better mothers than very many of the natives we saw in Africa. One incident that we witnessed in connection with the Colohus monkeys is hard to understand. We were studying them at Kijabi for a group for the
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J. T. with her "cliaiiilifrlain" and full regalia. This picture with AUie, her "nurse," as we al- ways called him, was taken immediately "on the equator" near Eldama Ravine in British East Africa. She rode on Allie's shoulder or head in our travels from camp to camp and was usually fed by him, but. as she was accustomed to a life on the forest-covered banks of streams, the glare of the sun made her sick, wherefore the um- brella. In going about their own business in their own way the guenon monkeys (Lasio- pyga^, to which genus J. T. belonged, are very wiry and agile. They travel through the for- ests, swinging from branch to branch, and even make long and warlike excursions into distant parts, but the strange monotony of human travel was very fatiguing to .J. T. Field )\Iuseum, and shot some of them for specimens to mount. When one of the young monkeys was wounded and fell to the ground, an older monkey came down out of the tree and killed the wounded one, and then made its escape. The baboons are amusingly human in taking care of their babies—as I dis- covered during a two weeks' stay we made on the Lucania Hills. These hills nre alive with baboons, hundreds and 11 undreds of them in troops or families, —one family used to come every night to sleep in a tree just back of our camp. The mothers with the young monkeys on their backs climbed the rocks; even though the wall seemed absolutely per- )iendicular, these baboon mothers would find a way up. The big old male baboon, weighing at least seventy-five pounds, would come down perhaps fifty yards nearer our tent than the mothers, who stayed with the babies on the rocks above. Here he would sit on scout duty, his chin propped on his hand, where he could see over the whole coun- try. Meanwhile, the mothers prepared their children for "bed" by taking them on their laps and picking off the burs and ticks. If one of the babies, with its head hanging over the mother's lap, would try to play, reaching out its hands to another baby on the ground, the mother would take it up and slap it and shake it just as human mothers do, then put it down again and go on with her work. And the baby would squeal and the other little one would run off. The one punishment was never sufficient, however, to teach the baby to lie quiet, and it would have to be spanked two or three times before it was ready for bed. * Then the children would scamper off up into the tree and we could hear them squealing and fighting for the best jjlaces—probably to get next to their own mothers. It grows dark very quickly in equatorial Africa and they

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