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Speciforyo Directory 04
Duvaucel affirms that he has seen the females carry their young to the water-side and there wash their faces, in spite of resistance and cries. They are gentle and affectionate in captivity--full of tricks and pettishness, like spoiled children, and yet not devoid of a certain conscience, as an anecdote, told by Mr. Bennett will show. It would appear that his Gibbon had a peculiar inclination for disarranging things in the cabin. Among these articles a piece of soap would especially attract his notice, and for the removal of this he had been once or twice scolded. "One morning," says Mr. Bennett, "I was writing, the Ape being present in the cabin, when, casting my eyes toward him, I saw the little fellow taking the soap. I watched him without him perceiving that I did so: and he occasionally would cast a furtive glance toward the place where I sat. I pretended to write; he seeing me busily occupied, took the soap, and moved away with it in his paw. When he had walked half the length of the cabin, I spoke quietly, without frightening him. The instant he found I saw him he walked back again and deposited the soap nearly in the same place from whence he had taken it. There was certainly something more than instinct in that action: he evidently betrayed a consciousness of having done wrong both by his first and last actions--and what is reason if that is not an exercise of it?"
igher up in the scale of life we get many instances which show various stages in the same progressive development towards greater care for the safety and education of the young. Among the larger lizards, for example, a distinct advance may be traced between the comparatively uncivilized American alligator and his near ally, the much more cultivated African crocodile. On the banks of the Mississippi, the alligator lays a hundred eggs or thereabouts, which she deposits in a nest near the water's edge, and then covers them up with leaves and other decaying vegetable matter. The fermentation of these leaves produces heat and so does for the alligator's eggs what sitting does for those of hens and other birds: the mother deputes her maternal functions, so to speak, to a festering heap of decomposing plant-refuse. Nevertheless, she loiters about all the time, like Miriam round the ark which contained Moses, to see what happens; and when the eggs hatch out, she leads her little ones down to the river, and there makes alligators of them. This is a simple and relatively low stage in the nursery arrangements of the big lizards.
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