others eat and destroy melons, figs, grapes, oranges and almonds. An alarm sends them flying. This bad habit lands many of them in zoos and travelling shows, because traps are set for them.
The street strollers of India, Japan and Northern Africa lead about the macaque (ma-cake') or bonnet monkeys. The hair of the macaques grows in a frill around the face. These sunbonnet babies are quick and clever. One of them loves crabs so well that he has learned to swim and dive for his favorite food. The pig-tailed bonnet monkey of the East India Islands is used on plantations to climb up the tall palms, where men cannot go, to pick cocoanuts.
Now there is one very sad thing about these amusing little creatures, or rather there used to be. Tropical animals, as most of them are, they very seldom lived over the first winter in our colder country. Like human beings they got tu-ber'cu-lo'sis (consumption) or pneu-mo'nia, or some other lung trouble, and died. Steam-heated houses were built for them to live in in the winter, and every breath of cold air was shut out. They seemed to die all the faster. Every spring the monkey cage had to be restocked. When the doctors found out that people with tuberculosis often got well if they lived out of doors, even in the coldest weather, Mr. De Vry, the animal keeper in the Lincoln Park Zoo of Chicago, thought he would try the fresh-air treatment on the monkeys. One fall he fed his monkeys more good food but left them out of doors. See what happened.
They shivered and had to jump around very lively to keep warm. You know it is sometimes awfully cold in Chicago, with freezing winds and smothers of snow right from the Rocky Mountains. The monkeys lived and thrived. Their bodies grew fat, their furry coats long and thick. In the spring more than half of them were alive and well. And! Wonder of wonders!
In the cage were several mothers, each with a baby cuddled in her arms. Never before had a baby monkey been born in captivity in a cold climate. They lived, too, and frisked about as if they were in the hot forest along the Amazon, instead of on the bleak shore of Lake Michigan. In the Lincoln Park Zoo, now, are monkeys several years old; and all big zoos and menageries have learned to turn their monkeys out of doors in all kinds of weather.
