can do so for short distances, and the story of their using a stick and
walking erect by its help in the wild state is not true. Monkeys, then,
are both four-handed and four-footed beasts; they possess four hands
formed very much like our hands, and capable of picking up or holding
any small object in the same manner; but they are also four-footed,
because they use all four limbs for the purpose of walking, running, or
climbing; and, being adapted to this double purpose, the hands want the
delicacy of touch and the freedom as well as the precision of movement
which ours possess. Man alone is so constructed that he walks erect with
perfect ease, and has his hands free for any use to which he wishes
to apply them; and this is the great and essential bodily distinction
between monkeys and men.

We will now give some account of the different kinds of monkeys and the
countries they inhabit.


THE DIFFERENT KINDS OF MONKEYS AND THE COUNTRIES THEY INHABIT.

Monkeys are usually divided into three kinds--apes, monkeys, and
baboons; but these do not include the American monkeys, which are really
more different from all those of the Old World than any of the
latter are from each other. Naturalists, therefore, divide the whole
monkey-tribe into two great families, inhabiting the Old and the New
World respectively; and, if we learn to remember the kind of differences
by which these several groups are distinguished, we shall be able
to understand something of the classification of animals, and the
difference between important and unimportant characters.

Taking first the Old World groups, they may be thus defined: apes have