d
latches that we are tempted to believe in some previous state of
existence she was a professional lock-picker!

Cats and dogs are famed for their ability to open doors by pulling
latch-strings. And not a few cats show a strong desire to study music by
walking up and down the keyboard of a piano!

Monkeys who live near the seashore show wonderful aptness in opening
oysters and shell-fish with sharp stones, exactly as a man would do.
Monkeys have already reached the degree of civilization where they
select the stones best suited for their work, and from their progress in
the past it is reasonable to believe that in the near future they will
not only be able to make their own tools--thus placing themselves on a
mental footing with our flint-chipping ancestors of the early stone
age,--but will also learn the use of fire and eventually the use of guns
and ammunition, which marks one of the most important epochs in the
evolution of the human species.

The chimpanzees, gorillas, and apes of the African forests have many
times been observed in the act of piling brushwood upon the fires left
by travellers, and though they do not know how to kindle a fire, they
have learned how to keep it burning. The tame ones soon learn how to
ignite matches, and often do great harm by starting forest fires.

But they show quite as much intelligence about the use of fire as the
average small child. In fact, it has been thought by a number of great
scholars that man had not yet made his appearance upon the earth in the
miocene age, and that all the marvellous chipped flints of that age
belong to semi-human pithecoid apes of wonderful intelligence. There is
surely nothing in the facts of natural history, nor in Darwin's theory
of evolution, that makes such a supposition unbelievable.

Baboons use poles as levers, stones as hammers, and seem to understand
the more simple mechanical devices. Prantl claims that man is the only
animal capable of using fire but not a few baboons know how to strike a
match, heap dried leaves over the blaze to make it burn, and then heap
on dead wood to feed the fire. This knowledge with them, exactly as with
primitive peoples, is a product of long experience and does not show any
mathematical truths or principles any more than making a direct cut
across a field implies "knowledge of the relation of a hypothenuse to
the two other sides of a right-angled triangle." This is what Prantl
calls "spontaneous mathematic