Richard Grant White

“ 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. ”

“ Does not every countryman of the Darwin believe that there is a lion in his breast, the rousing of which would be followed by consequences so dreadful, that of late years he allows him to sleep under the most irritating provocations? And does not all this bear witness to various and numberless applications of the principle of sexual selection during past ages? Frankly, I cannot tell. It may be so, and it may not. The wisest gorilla knows so little that what we call knowledge is often merely the name we give to ignorance. ”

“ She threw herself in the way of the squirrel, and, being a fascinating female, soon brought him to that state of mind in which he felt that he could not be happy without her, and of course that she could not be happy without him. Indeed, she avowed her admiration for him openly, but told him that his beauty had but one drawback—his tail. She could not endure a gentleman with a tail. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such folly is incomprehensible to a thorough-bred and high-toned gorilla, who is eminently conservative, and likes to stand upon a solid foundation; and how any people who are in the slightest degree connected with us can seek, or endure, a life upon that shifting and cruel element that is the proper habitation of fishes and crocodiles and hippopotamuses, we cannot surmise, or could not, were it not for our newly-acquired knowledge of the working of the principle of sexual selection, that great newly-found key to all the mysteries of life. ”

“ I was gradually stripped of my artificial covering, and revealed to my pursuer in that state of nature which bore yet further witness to our kindred. I turned my head again; she was gaining on me rapidly. The jungle that impeded and bewildered me, offered little or no restraint to her swift, practised steps. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The very ears have not quite disappeared; for the Darwin himself says that some men can move their ears, and that length of the organ has only been diminished somewhat and turned down at the top. Does not man recognize this, and often call his fellow-man an ass? But who ever applied that term to a gorilla? And was one of our race, I ask, ever designated as Old Hoss? But every man knows that some of his fellow-men are geese, and vultures, and sharks, and foxes, and jackals? Are there not pigeons among them? Yes, Darwin, pigeons whom they pluck remorselessly. ”

“ Whereupon there was great commotion in the whole community. Was it to be endured that that fellow’s wives should sit in huts and sniff? Would a husband of any spirit, not to say a husband who cared anything for his wives, endure that? There was an outbreak of complexion fever among all the females. Such a thing as a complexion was never before heard of; but now every female had one; and nothing would preserve it, or save her from convulsions, but a hut for its protection. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In this deplorable condition of affairs, we were saved by the action of the same great principle of sexual selection to which we owed our degradation. By a female came our fall, and through a female came our salvation. A gorilla maiden of tender years, and whose sea-serpentine appendage was yet in its earliest stages of development, saw the time approaching when she would be courted and perhaps claimed and taken by some two-legged termination of an elongated sea-monster. ”

“ She had never mentioned her intimacy with the squirrel, and soon afterward picked a quarrel with him and cut his acquaintance as short as he had cut his tail.
Denuded of their hair, deprived of their hind thumb, thinking “therefore” and “I am ashamed,” provided with huts for the land, and the ability, in at least one family, to manage a bark on the water, the new species of gorilla now differed so widely from our own that their degeneration became very rapid, and it required but a short period, only a few hundred thousand years more, to make them sink into the depth of manhood. ”

“ She was a strong-minded female, and she determined to free herself, and if possible her race, from the dreadful consequences of the indiscretion of her ancestress. Like that ancestress, she shunned the opposite sex, withdrew from society, and gave herself up to solitary wanderings. The problem which she had undertaken to solve was difficult; for then not only gorillas, but all living things had tails. But when was female ingenuity and perseverance ever baffled in regard to marriage! In that matter, we of the stronger sex are mere puppets in the female hands. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It happened through another manifestation of the principle of sexual selection, and in this wise.
A lady gorilla—a young matron, who was generally believed to have her husband very well in hand, partly from his devotion to her, but chiefly through her selfish indifference to him, and who found herself for the second time in that interesting situation which gives every female who considers herself a lady the right to insist upon the gratification of her slightest whim and most fanciful caprice—took a notion that she must eat the soft parts of a very tender young crocodile. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For strong minded as a female may be, and even strong bodied, the unalterable decrees of nature have placed a limit to the efficiency of her will, although not to that of her wiles. Our forecasting and self-sacrificing ancestress might perhaps have stood guard over her male favorite, keeping him well fed and contented within her solitary seraglio ”

“ As time went by, however, there were other applications of the great principle discovered by the Darwin, which have left some traces upon the development of the new species. How otherwise could there be such a multitude of men who have really the habits and traits of other animals? Asses, for instance: how many men are but asses, with the outside which they have inherited from their gorilla ancestors—a kind of mixture of monkey and donkey which, I need not tell you, is never found in our branch of the family. ”

“ Let me further illustrate this topic by the story of a beautiful lady-dog, the elegant and high-bred Kaloolah. Worthy to bear the name of that lovely and renowned princess, our Kaloolah lived in a country far beyond the Great Waters. She was the daintiest and most delicate of her sex. Born of the famous Blakkantan tribe, her coat was of jetty brilliancy, soft and fine, and edged with the dark saffron border which is the mark of the highest families of her race. Not one white hair marred the jetty perfection of her exterior, to betray the indiscretion of any of her ancestresses. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The husbands yielded; the bait still proved taking; and the pride of the ladies was fed, if not their appetites. Soon it became an understood thing that any gorilla who was worthy the name of husband and father would sacrifice his tail to provide newly-born crocodiles for his wife; and ere long there was not a masculine tail to be seen in the community. The natural consequences ensued, as the Darwin has explained; and thus, by the operation of the laws of development and of sexual selection, the gorilla became again a tailless animal. ”