![]() Garner published three books on the subject of speech in primates, as well as articles in various magazines. In 1910, he brought a chimpanzee named Susie back to the United States and toured with her, attempting to demonstrate that she knew a hundred English words. He returned to Africa on several more research trips, some lasting more than a year. ![]() In Gabon, he attempted to decipher individual words of the chimpanzee language, and he also attempted to teach one chimpanzee a few words. Garner next raised funds for a trip to study chimpanzees in Gabon among his donors were such prominent figures as Edison, Alexander Melville Bell, and Grover Cleveland. He lived and observed from inside a cage, a few gorillas came near and none showed any aggression. ![]() In 1896 Garner went to Africa to study gorillas, then considered as aggressive. He became famous for an 1891 article, "The Simian Tongue", in which he argued that the lower primates have a rudimentary language, and that this language is the origin of human speech. He hypothesized that human speech might have arisen from animal sounds and "resolved to study those sounds in a methodic manner and try to learn the speech of animals." He acquired one of Thomas Edison's early phonographs and began to spend time observing and recording monkeys at zoos in Cincinnati, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Garner's career studying primates arose through his interest in Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution. ![]()
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