generally failed to catch, and then bringing them live birds and letting
them loose.

Hardly any faculty is more important for the intellectual progress of
man than _Attention_. Animals clearly manifest this power, as when a cat
watches by a hole and prepares to spring on its prey. Wild animals
sometimes become so absorbed when thus engaged that they may be easily
approached. Mr. Bartlett has given me a curious proof of how variable
this faculty is in monkeys. A man who trains monkeys to act in plays
used to purchase common kinds from the Zoological Society at the price
of five pounds for each; but he offered to give double the price if he
might keep three or four of them for a few days in order to select one.
When asked how he could possibly learn so soon whether a particular
monkey would turn out a good actor, he answered that it all depended on
their power of attention. If when he was talking and explaining anything
to a monkey its attention was easily distracted, as by a fly on the
wall or other trifling object, the case was hopeless. If he tried by
punishment to make an inattentive monkey act, it turned sulky. On the
other hand, a monkey which carefully attended to him could always be
trained.

It is almost superfluous to state that animals have excellent _memories_
for persons and places. A baboon at the Cape of Good Hope, as I have
been informed by Sir Andrew Smith, recognised him with joy after an
absence of nine months. I had a dog who was savage and averse to all
strangers, and I purposely tried his memory after an absence of five
years and two days. I went near the stable where he lived and shouted to
him in my old manner; he showed no joy, but instantly followed me out
walking, and obeyed me exactly as if I had parted with him only half an
hour before. A train of old associations, dormant during five years, had