Professor Robert M. Yerkes, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, has, for instance, watched the orangutan to find out whether this ape could reach things out all by himself. The professor saw him pile three boxes on top of one another when this was the only way of reaching a banana. Concerning this ape, the Harvard professor makes this significant remark:
"The orangutan is capable of expressing free ideas in considerable number and of using them in ways highly indicative of thought processes, possibly even of the rational order."
The great object of all research work on apes is perhaps best expressed by Dr. Jules Goldschmidt, of the Pasteur Institute, Paris, in this phrase:
"To increase or essentially modify the anthropoid brain to such a degree that it will approach man's brain as developed among the lower human races."
The most remarkable facts in actually training an ape to work have been accomplished by Dr. William H. Furness, of Philadelphia, who has taught a chimpanzee to shovel coal like a first-class fireman and to read the alphabet. Dr. Furness is a physician and a distinguished anthropologist and was formerly curator of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Science. He is a son of Dr. Horace Howard Furness, the Shakespearean scholar. It is only proper to say that Dr. Furness, while ascribing great cleverness to the apes, does not go as far as Professor Yerkes in crediting them with man-like mentality.
Dr. Furness has labored for six years with a pleasant mannered female chimpanzee named Mimi, whom he secured when she was one year old at  Liverpool, England, shortly after she had been captured in Africa. 