that. These huge, man-like creatures from the Old World are savage, and have to be kept separately in strong cages like other wild beasts. They are hard to catch, hard to tame, and harder to keep alive in captivity, so you will not often see one. By monkey, children always mean one of the smaller apes that can be tamed easily and led about by a string like a little dog, or kept with many others in a big room of wire netting and bars.
A monkey in captivity is happier in a cage with a number of other monkeys. "The more the merrier" is the rule in monkey land. Nearly every kind of small ape lives in a monkey village in the trees, when he is at home. There is a wise old male for a chief. He and the older males keep trespassers away from a chosen feeding place, and he leads them to a new home when they move. Early in the morning and late in the evening, seems to be play-time in a monkey town. All the monkeys leap and swing and chase each other, and "whoop and holler" as Riley says, like so many boys playing in the woods. Spoiled boys they are, too, doing a great deal of mischief by throwing down cocoanuts and other fruits and nuts, just to see them fall.
Some of these monkeys have the prettiest homes! They camp out all the year round. They love the dense woods of very hot countries, In the beautiful tropical forests along the Amazon River, in South America, monkeys live in bowers in the trees, among red and green carrots, butterfly orchid blossoms, brilliant birds and insects and flowering vines. They live in thousands of tropical islands in the sea, among palms and fruit trees. But a few are found in colder countries: in Mexico and in the mountains of India, Japan and Northern Africa, and even around the great fortress rock of Gibraltar, in Spain.
No matter how much monkeys may differ in other things, they are all alike in having four hands. The bear, the lion, the elephant, the dog—nearly all the animals you can think of, have four feet. Little girls and boys have two hands and two feet. A foot has a long sole and short toes, usually, and the toes cannot grasp and hold things. A hand has a nearly square palm, fingers much longer than toes, and a thumb. In the best kind of a hand the fingers and thumbs have three joints each, and can all be brought together in many positions, and even closed into a fist. All four of a monkey's feet, that he walks on, are really hands, with grasping fingers and more or less perfect thumbs. That is why a monkey is so clumsy
