Part 3

One overture was made to a female of our race which, if it had been accepted, might have resulted in a very great and striking modification of our traits. The incident has a direct connection with the subject of my lecture; for it was through this female, and partly in consequence of this affair, that our family tree divided into two great branches, and one of them degenerated into Man. It so happened, by one of those deplorable freaks of nature from which no race, however noble, is entirely free, that a male gorilla was born deformed. In his infancy he was almost without hair, and the great thumb upon the hinder extremities, to which chiefly we owe our proud distinction of being a four-handed race, was a puny thing, useless except for walking; and, in fact, of no more value than the big toe of some of the inferior animals. As he grew up, a sparse coat of soft hair did appear upon his body; but the deformed thumb of course never developed or changed; it only grew in proportion to his growth, and remained a miserable toe. Yet, will it be believed? certain of our young females, with the unaccountable caprice of their sex, showed a hankering after this young fellow. They found him, in their own phrase “so interesting!” “He was so different,” they said, “from the old humdrum style of gorilla gentlemen.” They called him elegant. Gorilla girls of the period, who might have commanded the devoted service of individuals of the opposite sex much more worthy of their attention, in fact, of individuals of mature age, and distinguished position, well-haired, and with gigantic hind thumbs—[Here the lecturer was observed to rub his coat well up, and to gradually advance one of his hind feet on the stump on which he was standing]—giddy creatures who might have won the favor of such persons who abounded then, and who are—in fact—I may say—who are—sometimes—to be found even now, actually preferred the society of this effeminate, this more than effeminate creature. And yet, in the interests of science, I must tell the exact truth; according to tradition, he was not quite a weakling. He was nimble and strong, but it was in a different way from that of the other males of his race. In his singularity was his charm. He was also lazy, listless, and indifferent. He took no notice of the fairer sex, even of those who were most devoted to him, and most open in their admiration. He might have lived without lifting a finger; for they delighted in nothing so much as in serving him. Making of the peculiarity that was the very occasion of their admiration an excuse for him and for themselves, they said, “Poor fellow! how can he be expected to get his living with that soft coat, and with no hind thumbs?” And so they ministered to him, each one hoping that she might be the one whom he found essential to his happiness. He was often seen stretched upon the grass, or lolling against a tree, with half a score of these infatuated young creatures grouped around him, waiting upon him, bringing him cocoanuts, endeavoring to win from him some special acknowledgment of thankfulness—some mark of preference.

In vain did other males approach these besotted damsels. In vain did they howl, and spring from tree to tree! In vain did they even dance with an extravagance—a frenzy of strength and agility which had never before been known in the annals of gorilla courtship, and which could be surpassed only by few of the many similar scenes described by the Darwin. It was as nothing compared with the listless languor of the soft-coated, and hind-thumbless fellow.

But, in like manner, vain was the devotion of these silly young creatures. No one of them found favor in his eyes. At last he sent sorrow and despair into their souls by telling them in secret, one by one, that although she was very good, and although to have cocoanuts, and fruit, and water brought to him by such a nice waiter-girl was very pleasant, and he was very much obliged, he thought it only fair, under the circumstances, and considering her obvious expectations, to say that he was not a marrying gorilla. In fact, he never could be fond of such roughly-haired creatures as even she-gorillas were; and that, until he found one whose coat was even softer and slighter than his own, he should remain a bachelor. They heard his avowal in silent grief, each one saying in her heart that his conditions were cruelly difficult to comply with; in fact, as she turned the matter over in her mind—quite im-pos-si-ble. And each one silently resolved that she would admit the addresses of no other gentleman gorilla, let him dance before her never so furiously; but all her life would remain the virgin widow of her living love. Such, the Darwin tells, has been the determination of the females of other races, dogs, guinea-hens, etc.[5]

Footnote 5:

See “The Descent of Man, etc.,” chapter xiv., _passim_; where, however, the reader will find recorded multitudinous instances of fickleness, faithlessness, and forgetfulness on the part of “widows;” unfeminine forwardness, and even of downright “seduction” on the part of matrons and even of maidens of the bird family.

Among this interesting—I must say interesting, although infatuated—group of gorilla girls was one who took this determination more seriously to heart than the others did. She gave herself up to loneliness and melancholy musings. She left the delights of caves and woods and the companionship they bring, and wandered forth upon the plains, level and lonely, rockless, treeless, and dismal with sunlight. Her thought, day and night, was, “How can I rid myself of this disgusting coat of coarse hair? and if I could do so, should I find favor in his eyes?”

As she was one day near the edge of the great desert, musing on her ever-present theme, she became gradually conscious that she was not alone; then that a tall personage was in her presence; and then that a great exhibition of fuss and feathers was going on before her. It was an ostrich, one of the largest and most distinguished of his race. He had seen her frequently come to this place, so unfrequented by her people, and walk about it with slow and pensive air. What was her motive? What could it be but one? Was not he there? There was nothing else there but the sand and the sunlight; and yet she came almost daily. He drew the same conclusion that the hippopotamus did, but without equal reason or good fortune. Under the circumstances, however, and misled as he was, what could he do but make himself agreeable to the lady, and pay some attention to her? No he-creature with a spark of masculine spirit in him could do less. So he began to strut up and down before her, and to expand his wings and his tail. He ran violently about. He lifted up his voice and squawked. He ate sand, and, burrowing in it with his huge bill and finding the hoof and leg-bone of a horse that had died many years before in the desert, he brought it triumphantly, and, laying it down at her feet, ate it up before her eyes. Could anything be more agreeable—any attention more flattering to the female heart? What, then, must have been her gratification when after a few moments she saw him again eat up one just like it? Deeming himself quite irresistible after this last performance, he fluttered directly toward her. The family of man has its stories and traditions, all of which have some foundation in fact, but are much magnified or perverted or misunderstood. This story of their ancestors they tell, transferring the heroine to their own race, and making him a male swan called Jupiter, and her a kind of female man called Leda. According to man, the swan was received with open arms; but the gorilla girl fled from the ostrich. His intentions, I have no doubt, were strictly honorable; while in the man story I regret to say the Jupiter’s were not; but they were none the less unwelcome to her. Mistaking her flight for the coquetry of her sex, he pursued; and although love for another and consequent aversion to him lent her wings, he had real wings, as well as long legs, and by the use of both he was gaining on the object of his pursuit, when not far off she saw the object of her affections. She sped toward him and flung herself panting into his arms. He held her there for a moment, and then moved, partly by gratitude for her many services, and partly by the feeling that, although he did not want her himself, yet, as she had thought of him, no one else should have her, he laid her lightly down, and with a club made such a vigorous attack upon the ostrich that the latter soon turned and fled back to his sand, his hen, and his horsehoofs.[6]

Footnote 6:

The learned lecturer here gives but a feeble imitation of a passage, upon “the courtship of birds,” cited in “The Descent of Man,” etc., chapter xiv., of which, widely circulated as that popular work is, I need here reproduce only the concluding part, if, indeed, even in the interests of science, I could venture to give more:

—“elle refuse constamment ses caresses; les avances empressées, les agaceries, les tournoiements, les tendres roncoulements, rien ne peut lui plaire ni l’emouvoir; gonflee, boudeuse, blottie dans un coin de sa prison, elle n’en sort que pour boir et manger, on pour repousser avec une espèce de rage des caresses devenus trop pressantes.”

Whether this incident in the history of our species is to be altogether deplored, I do not feel competent to decide. True, the perfection of the gorilla form and the purity of its traits were preserved. We remained at the head of the animal creation, unequalled in our combination of beauty and strength; but might we not by this profferred alliance have been elevated? Might we not have hoped to add to all our other superiority the beauty and the power of wings? Might we not have become as the angels—nay, very angels ourselves? Might not we, instead of poor, feeble, pusillanimous man, have furnished the traits which were to be sublimed into the forms of archangels and ministering spirits? Might not we have become seraphs and our children cherubs? Man has his Raphael, as he has his Darwin, whose imagination framed from things actual things impossible—winged men and pin-feathered man-children—creatures never known on Earth or in Heaven. But the Darwin himself is my authority for telling you that, if our kinswoman had yielded to her winged suitor, the Raphael would have only needed to paint gorilla portraits. Think of the change, the superiority, as well in beauty as in truthfulness, that would have been made in his works if female caprice had not prevented this application of the principle of sexual selection? This, however, was not to be; and that it was not, is one of those mysterious dispensations at which we must wonder, but to which we are taught that we must thankfully submit.

This affair, strange to say, had a direct influence in the development of that singular and enfeebled variety of our species known as Man. Our kinswoman was more set by it than ever before in her aversion to all other suitors, and in her devotion to the one object of her love. The momentary clasp of his arms, and his defence of her against another suitor not only bound her to him more strongly than before, but seems to have developed in her a strange faculty which never was known before in any of our species, and which has never appeared in any other in the direct line. Her solitary wanderings were now more limited in extent than they were before this remarkable occurrence. Her experience of the desert kept her within the line of sand which she sometimes approached, but never passed again. Yet she continued to muse alone, and constantly upon the one theme, her strong, thick coat of hair, now become odious to her, and how it might be softened and diminished. Pining away in her despair, she leaned one day against a tree, and remained there for a long time wrapped in sad reverie. Coming to herself again, she was about to continue her walk, when she found that she could not move away. Her arm, from the shoulder to the elbow, stuck fast to the tree. It was a gum-tree, and she had not seen that a broad stream of thick, half-dried gum was on that part of the trunk against which she leaned. The hair on the outside of her arm had been imbedded in the gum, which, drying as she leaned, held her fast, a prisoner. She looked about for help. None was near, not even that cold and cruel gorilla who had told her that he could not love her. Nothing was left but to tear herself away by main strength. Summoning all her fortitude and her force, she threw herself forward and fell upon the ground with a scream that might have been heard afar off, for she had torn out by the roots every hair that had touched the tree.

For many days she suffered in her loneliness; but her pain passed gradually away. But then came the depressing thought that she must now be more repulsive than before, a mutilated creature, with a bare patch on one arm, from the shoulder to the elbow. At first this was worse to bear than the pain of the injury; but ere long she was led from despair to hope by a strange way of thinking which man calls reason, which I have mentioned before, and which I am happy to say is unknown to gorillas; and the consequence of which, in this case, will cause you all to sympathize with me in my felicitations. The thought that if the object of her love longed for a female with a coat softer and finer and sparser than his own, he might, as she said, therefore (but who of us can tell what _therefore_ means?), possibly like one better yet who had no hairy coat at all. And she thought, too, that as she had deprived herself by accident of a small part of her coat, she might (using again the unmeaning word) therefore get rid of the whole of it intentionally by the same means. “At least,” she said, “I shall be in no worse condition than I am now, as far as he is concerned, and what do I care for the others? And if I die, there is but one gone that cares little to remain.” She went to the tree. The gum had flowed again; and in like manner, and with like pain as before, she bared her lower arm of hair. Thus she went on, week after week, as she could endure the torment, and find gum-trees in their flow, until at last she had bared her whole body.

During this process she kept herself more secluded than ever, lest by chance he to please whom she suffered should see her before her sacrificial transformation was complete. She shuddered at the thought of his catching her half made up, in a sort of grand fleshly deshabille. Fortune favored her, and no one saw her until her whole body was as smooth as the inside of her hand. Then she restrained her impatience, and fed and nursed herself with a care she had not taken for many months, that she might regain all the litheness and the grace that she felt that she had lost. Even when she thought that she had gained all this (but how little seemed the all!), she hesitated and kept shyly to herself for many days—a foolish backwardness, of which I am sure no young gorilla lady before me would be guilty! But at last, feeling that nothing more was to be gained by delay, and that her fate might as well be decided first as last, she sallied forth.

Fortune favored her again; for she soon saw at a short distance the object of her search. At first she started to run to him; but hardly had she taken a few steps when she hesitated, halted, and finally turned away, overcome by a feeling entirely new to her. She had been for many weeks preparing herself, through pain and care, to please this very male gorilla, whom in former days she waited on and cooed to and coaxed, without a thought except of the pleasure she had and the pleasure she hoped for, although in vain. But now that she had some reason to hope that she would find the favor that she longed for, she shrunk within herself and feared to offer him that which it was her only desire in life that he should want and take.

With that change in her mind that made her say “therefore,” there had come another in her soul that made her say the still stranger words, “I am ashamed.” And so she turned away from him whom she had set out to find. But before she turned he had caught sight of her; and, struck by such a strange object as an entirely smooth-skinned female of his race, he immediately followed her. She fled, spurred on by her strange, conflicting apprehensions—first, lest he should like her, next, lest he should not. He gained upon her rapidly and soon came up with her, and she sank upon the ground before him. He stood and looked at her, and she saw that there was no recognition in his eyes; but there was something else that repaid her for that loss—admiration; and presently he and her heart began to dance together. He, the lazy, listless fellow of former days, leaped and curvetted like a young antelope. He bounded his full height into the air, he roared with that enchanting roar of his, he beat his breast, he ran up to the top of an enormous tree, and came near killing her by flinging himself down so close to her that had she not swayed lightly aside, he would have dashed her to pieces. But never was a female before in so precious a peril; and as he stood before her, panting with exertion, she sidled up to him, and, laying her head upon his shoulder, and taking his hands, she led them lightly and tenderly over her soft, smooth limbs and body, that, all unknown to him, had suffered such torment for his delight. After that, as men would say, she was his’n and he was her’n. This is the kind of language that they call poetical.

She did not tell him that she was the same old girl that had made love to him before. That secret she kept very profoundly and deceitfully hidden in her own bosom, until it was brought out by another incident that has a direct bearing upon our subject. She was just about to bring forth the first fruit of their happiness, and he was off gathering the daintiest food that he could find for her, when she thoughtlessly strolled near the edge of the sandy desert, and walked along it, musing to herself and wondering if her child would be as handsome as its father, when suddenly she looked up, and there, at a short distance from her, stood the great ostrich who had before persecuted her with his attentions. He darted toward her; and she, fleeing as rapidly toward her cave as her condition would permit, was soon met again by the same defender as before, who this time, after a brief contest, slew the ostrich before her eyes. The effect of this shock was that that night her child was born. It was the most remarkable birth in the history of our race; yet not of our race, for it was not a gorilla that she produced; and here began the new departure. It was a male child which, to look forward a few years, had not the hind thumb of his mother but the toe of his father, and had even less and finer hair than he, and besides (a trait which his mother attributed to her critical encounter with the ostrich), he walked constantly erect, and with straight legs, like that large, feathered biped. Moreover, he inherited from his mother those strange thoughts, “therefore” and “I am ashamed.”

Then, explaining her terror to the father of the child whose birth it had hastened, she confessed to him, she was almost obliged to confess, that she was the poor girl who had loved him so long, and whom he had protected before against the too ardent courtship of the same suitor; he could hardly believe his ears, and his curiosity was excited to know the manner of her transformation. At first she refused to tell; but he asked her again and again; and after some months had passed and she had brought forth her second child—this time a girl, with a smooth body, like herself, and without a hind thumb, like the father, and with the straight, ostrich-way of walking, in a moment of female triumph at this charming success of the principle of development, and of the greater principle of sexual selection, she confessed to what artifice she owed her hairless skin.

He was now naturally not with her so much as during the first months of their union, and his behavior toward her was more placid and serene. Every gorilla matron among my hearers must have had the same experience. Pursuit must always be more or less eager; possession must always be more or less quiet. And if any of my lady hearers have been dissatisfied or disturbed by the manifestation of this inevitable and eternal truth—[Here there was a movement among the females, and one rose and shrieked out, “Disturbed! dissatisfied! To be sure we are. You’re all a set of brutes. Sea-serpents, and hippopotamuses, and ostriches are nothing to you!” The males just turned their heads with bland, pitying smiles, and then gave their attention again to the lecturer, who continued]—if, I say, they have been dissatisfied or disturbed by the manifestation of this inevitable and eternal truth, to which the relations of male and female are merely not an exception, they only show that they expect that the operations of laws of nature will be suspended for the gratification of their pride. During one of his absences, in the still noon of a summer’s day, she heard a faint scream in the distance. But, faint as it was, it seemed unlike those that are sometimes heard in the forest solitudes, and yet like a sound she remembered to have heard before, she could not recollect when or where. In the course of a few weeks it was explained, when one day he appeared, accompanied by another smooth-skinned gorilla girl, who she saw at once was one of those whose love he had before despised, and who was now his wife. To be brief, he found that of the ten who had devoted themselves to him, and who had vowed to have no other love, only three had yielded to the courtship of his rivals, and the remaining six he persuaded to qualify them selves for his admiration, and the nuptials which they had so long and so eagerly coveted. They all illustrated equally well with his first wife the beautiful principles of development and sexual selection, and soon he was surrounded with a large and growing family of smooth-skinned, hind-thumbless, erectly-walking children, of whom the males chiefly said, “therefore,” and the females, “I am ashamed.”

The appearance of this new family in the gorilla country caused a profound sensation throughout our species. The tradition of the sea-serpent alliance and its deplorable consequences were remembered and discussed. The conservative feeling was fully aroused. A mass-meeting, in the nature of a general _conseil de famille_, was held; and it was finally decided that, to prevent confusion and the deterioration of the race (for what consequences might not be apprehended from female fancy for smooth-skinned, hind-thumbless lovers, who walked like ostriches! what wide-spread disaster might not ensue upon the application of the principle of sexual selection under these new circumstances!), that this new family of non-descript creatures, who, whatever they might be, were certainly not gorillas, should be driven from our borders. Whatever might have been the wishes of the new family in this regard, they (most of them being yet of tender years) could not resist such a determination on the part of a whole tribe, and they submitted. The world was before them where to choose; and they chose to go northward toward the borders of the great sea. Ere long they were seen moving in that direction, the father of the family lounging listlessly in his old way in advance, the females following, carrying the provender and such of the children as were too small to walk. And thus began the first migration. This was the first step in the Fall of Man, which he, in one of those traditions of which I spoke, has embodied and perverted into a tale which he calls, and well calls, “The Expulsion from Paradise.”