The educated
specimens met with in our cities are upon the whole well Organized, and
appear to have music in their soles. For its feats _a pied_, the tame
monkey is indebted to a Piedmontese who accompanies him.
To behold the monkey race in their glory, however, they must be seen in
their native woods, where they dwell in genteel independence, enjoying
their entailed estates and living on their own cocoa nuts. There will be
found the Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall when yielding the Palm to some
aspiring rival is swifter than that of the Roman Empire; the Barberry
Ape, so called from feeding exclusively on Barberries; the
Chimpanzee--an African corruption of Jump-and-see, the name given to the
animal by his first European discoverers in compliment to his alertness;
the Baboon, a melancholy brute that, as you may observe from his visage,
always has the blues; to say nothing of a legion of Red Monkeys, which
are particularly Rum Customers.
Some men of science have advanced the theory that man is the climactic
consequence of innumerable improvements of the monkey; the negro as he
now exists being the result of the Fifteenth Amendment. These
philosophers erect a sort of pyramid of progress, placing an Ape at the
base and a Caucasian at the Apex. This wild hypothesis of a monkey
apotheosis can of coarse only be regarded Jockolarly, in other words,
with a grin. Nevertheless the Marmozet is sufficiently like a little
Frenchwoman to be called a Ma'amoiselle, and there are (in New-Zealand
for instance) human heathen with a craving for the Divine, to whom the
Gorilla, though not a man, is certainly a brother.
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