MONKEYS AND LIGHT.

Waikato Times, Volume XIX, Issue 1565, 15 July 1882, Page 6

MONKEYS AND LIGHT.

It is a strange fact that iv night-time an unknown sound will scare monkeys almost out of their wits. The creaking of a wheelbarrow, a whisper, the rustling of a window curtain, is enough to throw them into a fit of horrified screams and, contortions ;,capuchin monkeys rush wildly through their cage, macaques try .to force their prison doors, the little marmosets huddle together ,like the princes in the Tower, all about •, a, matter they would disdain to notice in daytime. The old males, of the anthrppoid apes are abput as hard to scare as any, living crea-, ■ ture, but after dark the veriest trifle, will inspire them with an almost supernatural' fear ; and it may be 'tqimerp / an ,py» „ but I; , cannot get ' rid of", the , no^tio^jbliat this i night-horror, of our hirsute be the savage .nations, and jindirectl^i^^a^s,.

Hilierefore, are almost at the mercy of their, enemies, jagtiars, panthers, and leopards; whose owl-eyes enable them to hunt by moonlight/ and in the virgin woods of the topics the constant dread of mistaking the approach of a murderer for the rustling of the fitful night-wind would be enough to^ make a Berserker nerveus. "It is not books or pictures," says Charles Lamb, "nor the stories of foolish servants, which create these terrors in' children. They can at most give them a direction. The stories of tho Chinueras and Gorgons may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition, but they wero there before. They are transcripts, types: the archetypes are in us, and eternal. May it not be that those arche-types are the prowling ferae of the tropical forests? — JExehanfje.