Part 1

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THE FALL OF MAN: OR, THE LOVES OF THE GORILLAS.

A POPULAR SCIENTIFIC LECTURE UPON THE Darwinian Theory of Development by Sexual Selection.

BY A LEARNED GORILLA.

Edited by the Author of “THE NEW GOSPEL OF PEACE.”

NEW YORK: G. W. Carleton & Co., Publishers. LONDON: S. LOW & CO. M.DCCC.LXXI.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by G. W. CARLETON & CO., In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

Stereotyped at THE WOMEN’S PRINTING HOUSE. Eighth Street and Avenue A, New York.

DEDICATION.

TO CHARLES DARWIN, ESQ., M.A., F.R.S., ETC., ETC., ETC.

SIR:

To you is dedicated this faithful report of a humble attempt to confirm, explain, and elucidate the wonderful and irrefragable theory of which you are the discoverer and the promulgator. Of which dedication the appropriateness is manifest. What other disposition of the work of your learned kinsman would be so fitting as to lay it at your feet, hind-thumbless although they be? He follows you feebly and afar. But remember that he tells only what he knows, and does not attempt to soar with you to the dizzy heights of speculation, or dive with you into the depths of disbelief. Deign, sir, to accept this modest tribute to the fame of one who has done so much to elevate our conception of ourselves and of the great scheme of creation; and look with the generous eye of exalted genius upon the honest and simple effort of a co-laborer who strives, with you, to convince the world that a Shakespeare may be but an oyster raised to the one-thousandth power, or even a Darwin the cube root of a ring-tailed monkey.

THE EDITOR.

INTRODUCTION.

ONE morning in the spring of the present year I, the editor, or rather the reporter, of the following lecture, found myself in a forest of Western Africa. I was neither searching for the source of anything nor hoping to meet anybody. But, as I walked on my lonely way, I did soon come upon a man, much be-tattered and bronzed, who was plainly an Anglo-Saxon. He was bathing his feet in a muddy little spring, from which a tiny rill ran out and lost itself in the leafy gloom. As I passed him I turned my head inquiringly, and he looked up and said, “Yes, my name is Livingstone, and this is it. It empties into a duck-pond about a mile off, and that empties into a series of mill-ponds, each a little larger than the other, from the last of which a river runs into Lake Nyanza. This is it; and so I thought that, as I am rather tired with my tramp, I would bathe my feet. Throw a chip in here, and it will float past Thebes and the Pyramids into the Mediterranean. Just send word to Murchison, please, that I’ll be along presently. Good morning.” “All right,” I answered; “good morning,” and continued my walk, thinking how nice and jolly it was to find Livingstone making a wash-pot of the source of the Nile.

As I went onward, musing upon the eternal fitness of things, an endless theme, I became aware that there were many monkeys around me, of various kinds, but chiefly gorillas. They were all in motion, not disporting themselves or seeking food, but apparently moving forward, with one consent, in one direction. Some of them were leaping from tree to tree; others ran along upon the ground. As I went on the numbers increased, until at last I found myself surrounded by several hundred gorillas, many of them being the largest and fiercest of their species. There could not have been more if Mr. Du Chaillu had been present. Determined to see what was the occasion of this movement, I followed his example and joined the crowd. After walking for about an hour, the throng increasing at every step, we finally came upon an open place in the forest, and there we found a mass-meeting of monkeys. Some were seated upon the ground; others were perched upon the branches of the surrounding trees; and all seemed animated and expectant. There was a great chattering, which, in the confusion, I did not at first quite understand; although, having read Mr. Du Chaillu’s books in a docile mood, I was familiar with the monkey language, and particularly with the gorilla dialect. But I soon made out the words “Fall of man,” “interesting subject,” “lecture,” “Darwin,” “the learned Um Bugg Hee.” I inferred at once that there was to be a lecture on the monkey version of the Darwinian theory; and of course decided to wait, and bathe my feet also in the sources of the Nile. After the ladies had been escorted to front places (for, as Mr. Du Chaillu has told us, the gorillas are very attentive to their females), there was silence; and the lecturer, a large and solemn male gorilla, somewhat past middle age, mounted a stump, and delivered himself as follows. I have done nothing more than translate his lecture from Gorillese into a civilized form of thought and into the English idiom.

I will only call attention to the reserve and decorum of the gorilla lecture. Notwithstanding the nature of his subject, and the example of his illustrious predecessor and kinsman, he has made his amorous scenes few, and has treated them with great delicacy, and, unlike the former, has not made it necessary to cloak any part of his lecture in the obscurity of a learned language:—a doubtful expedient in these days—these practical days—when so many young women learn nothing of house-keeping but much of Latin.

LECTURE.

My Hairy Hearers:

MANY parts of the world, less happy than the wilds of our beloved Africa, are inhabited by a feeble, smooth-skinned creature called Man. This unhappy animal is much vexed with creeds and theories and notions; and the one of these which has been longest and most deeply rooted in his mind is, that he is a fallen being. For hundreds of years, for thousands, he has believed that his forefathers lived in a Golden Age, compared with which that in which he now toils and worries is an age of stone or iron; and he seems to have had a melancholy pleasure in the thought that in that golden age his race was better, happier, and handsomer than it is at present. Of all his fancies, this one has the best foundation. For, O my quadrumanous hearers, whether gorillas, chimpanzees, ouran-outans, or simple undistinguished monkeys! this feeble, helpless creature is akin to us, and is in fact our poor relation. The thought, indeed, is shocking. No respectable gorilla, of well-regulated mind, can contemplate it without horror. But the truth must be told sometimes; and the time has come when we must confess that man, weak, born without clothes—cruel, cowardly, and ungrateful man—is of our family; very remotely, I am happy to say, a kind of ten thousandth cousin, but still a direct descendant of our progenitors. From the high estate of gorilla-hood he has descended to that of manhood; and we are in a measure disgraced by his humiliation. This is the fall of man—that he has descended from monkey-hood to humanity.

The story of his descent in the scale of creation is sad and touching, and cannot be heard without deep emotion. What lady gorilla about to become a mother, or hoping that at some future day she may be about to become a mother—about to become a mother for the first, or second, or I will say even the third time (for I cannot suppose that any well-regulated lady gorilla would ever be about to become a mother for the fourth time)—what lady gorilla, I say, in this interesting condition of mind, could contemplate without shuddering the probability that, instead of presenting the gentleman gorilla of her affections with a pledge of their love that promised to have a hide and a bellow that would rival those of a buffalo, teeth like pebble-stones, a fine retreating forehead, and, above all, that high distinguishing feature of our race, a hind-thumb that is at once a terror to our foes and the most useful of all our members, she would produce a wrinkled, pink-bodied weakling, looking like a monkey—one of the smallest and feeblest of our race—that had been flayed alive, and which, even after reaching maturity, could live only by covering itself with an artificial skin, and by making machines with which to get its food and defend itself against its natural enemies! The idea is shocking; and I beg pardon of my lady friends for the suggestion, I may say the bare suggestion. But the story of this fall of man although sad, is interesting, and I shall proceed to tell it, counting on the indulgence of my hearers; for it is linked and twined with our own past history.

The tale has been lately told by one of these very miserable creatures, who, in the depths of his degradation, has yet had the sense to discover his relationship to us, and the grace to be proud of it. Yes, my well-haired friends, a man-animal called the Darwin has had the satisfaction of boasting to his fellows of his descent from the quadrumana. Not only so, he has traced it truthfully, step by step, to our shame and their glory. I shall tell you succinctly and directly what he spreads over a long and tedious narrative, full of assertions, and repetitions, and guesses, which he calls inferences. These are all needless to us; for, as he confesses, and we boast, we comprehend at once by instinct what he and his poor fellows in weakness and ignorance can only grasp by a long and painful process which they call reasoning, by which they are often led into absurdities attainable in no other way.

As you know, the world was made for the gorilla, and when he appeared he was in all the glory of his present strength and beauty. He was the last and highest of Nature’s productions, the ideal creature of the universe. True, there were others larger and stronger—on land and in water—lions, tigers, elephants, and the like, whales, crocodiles, and hippopotamuses; but these were of low caste, creatures with whom he could have no intercourse on terms of equality, and whom he could generally meet only as his natural enemies. For you must have observed that those who are below us hate us; hate us enough at least to rejoice in our downfall, if not to seek our destruction. Usually, too, they devour us, and feed their own life and growth by our extinction.

But the gorilla, too, has had his vicissitudes. Indeed, we may say that, like man, he has had his fall. Unlike man, however, he rose again, until he re-attained his present glorious perfection of form and feature. We fell, my quadrumanous friends, through the frailty and fickleness of the female sex. That charming and no less useful half of our race has also been its bane and its torment for many centuries. To them we owe the humiliating fact that gorillas once had tails, and that some even of our cousins are still afflicted with that ridiculous, although sometimes useful, appendage. I hope that none of those who are present, representing the be-tailed families of our species, will take offence at what I have said. All distinctions founded upon superiority have been done away by the revolutions of late years; and the last change in the fundamental law of our community, I think it was the fifteenth, made the smallest and longest-tailed monkey in Africa—my equal.

But to the story of our tail.

Long ago, so long that the years cannot be numbered upon all the fingers and toes of all the gorillas and monkeys in Africa, a beautiful young lady gorilla was courted by several gentlemen gorillas, some in their earliest youth, some nearer maturity, and some at that period of mature middle age which I—ah have—ah had occasion to observe is not without its peculiar charms to the tender and beautiful of her sex. But none of them found favor with her. She seemed averse to marriage. They went through all those performances which are at once tributes to beauty, and so allurements to its possessors. They danced, they strutted, they howled, they beat their breasts; they ran up the tallest trees and jumped from the tops, landing plump before her at the most unexpected moments, and in the most extraordinary and indescribable positions. They stood on their heads and clapped the palms of their hands and the soles of their feet together, howling at the same time so enchantingly that they could be heard for miles around. One of them even applied the thumb of one distended hand to his nose, and the thumb of his other distended hand to the little finger of the former, and so with the thumbs and fingers of his feet, and grinned in the most bewitching manner. But alas, she sat unmoved before all these demonstrations of strength, agility, and affection. To none of them did she seriously incline. True, there remained untried the form of mingled courtship and marriage, a seizure by main force and an elopement, which has been so common, and which is said to be not without its charms to many of her sex of all races, and in all climes, and which is one of those time-honored institutions, the abrogation of which would seem like the up-heaving of the foundations of society. But her size and her strength were so great that none of her suitors ventured upon this method of courtship; for it was understood that she lacked that willingness to be seized which alone gives this method its charm and its success. In fact, she was the Brunhilda of our race, for whom there were Günthers enough, but no Siegfried. She had let it be understood that if any lover pressed his attentions upon her she would bind his hands and feet together, and, bending down the biggest sapling she could find, tie him to its top and let it spring up with him into the air again. And so she was not molested, and passed through the woods in maiden-meditation, fancy free.

One day she sat upon the sea-shore, lonely and pensive, gazing upon the waters, when suddenly there appeared in the distance an enormous, oval head, with moon-like eyes, followed by many roods of body and tail, that rose and fell like the waves of the ocean. It was the Sea-serpent. She looked at first with wonder, then with curiosity, at last with admiration. What enormous grace of undulation! What seductive sinuosity! What bewildering immensity of horizontal extension! What glistening folds of glairy smoothness! What a piquant difference from the rectangular jointedness, the half-upright attitudes, and the hairy roughness of her obtrusive suitors! As she gazed, her heart told her that she had at last found her affinity. But, overcome although she was, she was also coy. Smitten to her very midriff with love’s dart, she would not, unsought, be won, even by the Sea-serpent. Nor would she be guilty of the impropriety of remaining alone with a member of the opposite sex, to whom she was not married, or even engaged, and indeed a gentleman who had not been properly introduced. She rose with maiden modesty, to walk away. But I am bound to say that her course did not lead her directly from the object which she thought it becoming to leave; rather, it must be confessed, in that oblique line before him, which gave the best opportunity to him of seeing her, and to her of casting glances at him, while she produced the impression that, if not stayed, she would very soon be out of sight. As she moved along the strand, he gazed, and was fascinated, not only by her hairy figure, but by the captivating combination of stride, stumble, and jump, which is the received mode of progression of our noble race. The Sea-serpent was enchanted. The flame was mutual. Nevertheless, after the manner of his sex, he set himself to win what was his already. He went through all his masculine and serpentine performances. He coiled himself up and stretched himself out. He lashed the sea into foam. He came on shore and tied himself up into true lover’s knots before her. He put his tail into his mouth, and rolled himself along the shore in a vast circle, the symbol of the eternity of his love. It seemed as if the very equator had become enamored of her charms, and, refusing any longer to belt the Earth, revolved within the reach of her superior attractions. Finally, by a super-serpentine effort, he stood straight up on the point of his tail, flapping his fins and hissing out his admiration with a noise like that of the Maelstrom. This accomplished his purpose. When she saw him thus reared up, and looking down with such perpendicular enormity of love, from an elevation of some hundred feet, the compliment was more than she could bear. The omnipotence of her charms had turned the equator to the pole; and, satisfied, she yielded. Then he, descending from his height, led her to their nuptial bower, a neighboring cave, nothing loath, but yet with coy, reluctant, amorous delay.[1]

Footnote 1:

The learned lecturer might here have cited, in support of the truthfulness of this and one or two other passages, Mr. Darwin’s much more impressive, as well as multitudinous, descriptions of what he calls “the act of courtship,” in chapters xiii, and xviii., passim, of “The Descent of Man and Selection in relation to Sex.”

The fruit of these nuptials appeared in due time. As might have been expected, it was a mingling of the traits of the two parents—a gorilla with a tail, which appendage had now been added to one of our race for the first time by the operation of the great principle of sexual selection. At first the tail was looked upon with suspicion, if not aversion. The most respectable matrons of our race scoffed, and sniffed, and turned up their noses at the little stranger. A gorilla with a tail! And they were right; the serpent had indeed entered our Eden. But Brunhilda was devoted to her married Siegfried, and produced at regular intervals new tailed-gorillas; more, the demon of love, or of curiosity, took possession of the young lady gorillas. They were fascinated by this huge Adonis of the deep; and baby gorillas with tails began to come with increasing frequency. The thing became the fashion; and what was at first the fashion, was ere long confirmed by convenience. As the first of this fallen race grew to adolescence, he not only flourished his tail with captivating grace, but he used it in climbing trees; he swam with it; he offered it as bait in the water, and came to shore with a crab or a lobster attached to it, which he ate himself or carried to his mother in triumph. And when at last, having taken to himself two wives, he hung by his tail to the branch of a tree, and grasping a wife by each hind foot, took a cocoa-nut in each hand, and broke them on the heads of the two ladies, doubt and derision were alike abandoned; there went up a howl of admiration, and he was declared to be fittest to survive in the struggle for existence. After this he could have married every lady gorilla in Africa; but there was no need of that. The generation of gentlemen gorillas with tails came rapidly to maturity, and were as rapidly-received into favor by the other sex. It became vulgar to have a lover without a tail, and lady gorillas of any pretentions to social distinction preferred to remain in a state of widowhood, or even of vestal virginity, rather than accept a lover who was not decorated. This went on until at last there were no gorillas without tails, except a few old fogies who took great pains to parade their tailless backs, stroking their sparse white whiskers, and talking of the good old times, when they were young, and no proper young lady gorilla would have looked at a Sea-serpent. But they were only laughed at for their pains.

A few years, however, showed the justice of their censure, and the sad consequences of Brunhilda’s indiscretion. A principle of normal development was then illustrated in our hapless and fallen race with direful results. The gorilla reaches maturity and full growth in a few years, but the Sea-serpent in, I do not know how many. It may be centuries. Science has not yet decided that interesting question. I am of the opinion that the Sea-serpent is still growing; for each time that he is seen he is larger than he was at his previous appearance. Be this as it may, when the gorilla part of the new species which had thus been formed reached maturity, it of course ceased to grow. Not so the sea-serpentine appendage. That followed its normal law of development, and kept on slowly growing.[2] At first this excited no apprehensions of trouble, but even a little pride. At last, however, the new species showed very little gorilla and a great deal of Sea-serpent, until at last they came to be a tail with a gorilla. The tails grew, and grew, and grew, until they wound and undulated off into the dim distance; and it seemed at last as if a gorilla might be here; and the end of his tail, if it had an end, vanish through far-stretching perspective into infinite space. The tails, too, following their natural instincts, had an irrepressible tendency toward the water, and while there they were so remote that they were entirely beyond the control of their owners. Lobsters clawed them, sharks snapped at them, and whales took offensive liberties with them. On land the result was an inextricable entanglement. At times the whole community would be tied up in one indistinguishable knot, like the worms in a man’s bait-box. It was proposed to cut off the tails with sharp flints or clam shells; and this was tried; but the tail was so very large and the gorilla so very small in proportion, that it was the gorilla that died, while the tail lived, wriggled down to the shore, and swam off to sea. After two or three experiments this plan was abandoned, as it must needs have been, or our race would have become extinct. Next, it was decided that each individual should gradually reduce the length of his tail by cutting it off joint by joint. But the confusion produced by the inter-twisting was so great that no one was quite sure of his own tail, and while he was sleeping, or eating, or disporting himself in as lively a manner as was possible in this gloomy condition of things, he was liable to feel a joint of his tail cut off by some other individual half a mile away, or perhaps sitting next him; and this might happen two or three times in one day after he had himself amputated his daily joint so great was the confusion. I blush to relate, too, that it destroyed the peace of many families, and threatened to sap the morals of the community. To this condition, my well-haired and tailless quadrumanous hearers, our race was reduced by the wayward fancy and unnatural longing of one female.

Footnote 2:

See “The Descent of Man,” etc., chapter viii. on “The Laws of Inheritance,” and “On the Relation of the Period of Development,” etc.

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