Phil Robinson

“ In India, where the monkeys live among men, and are the playmates of their children, the Hindoos have grown so fond of them that the four-handed folk participate in all their simple household rites. In the early morning, when the peasant goes out to yoke his plough, and the crow wakes up, and the dog stretches himself and shakes off the dust in which he has slept all night, the old monkey creeps down from the peepul-tree, only half awake, and yawns, and looks about him, puts a straw in his mouth, and scratches himself contemplatively. ”

“ A young one, grovelling under the straw, forgets that it has left its tail protruding, and the temptation is greater than the old one can resist. In a twinkling the challenge to a romp is accepted; and lo! while the senior makes a fool of himself among the straw with one of the children, the other child is on his perch, looking just as grave as he did, and gazing at intervals in the same wistful way out into the open air. ”

“ Fortunately for us the monkey is not proud. He has no reserve whatever, and betrays by his candor much that, if he were more reticent, would puzzle human beings beyond endurance. But the monkey makes us free of the whole of him, and conceals nothing. Yet, in spite of all this, the monkey remains a conundrum to human beings; and the more one thinks about him the less one feels sure of understanding. ”

“ But the old lady will stand no nonsense, and turning the child right side up proceeds to put it to rights; takes the kinks out of its tail and the knots out of its fur; pokes her fingers into its ears and looks at each of its toes, the inexpressible brat all the time wearing on its face an absurd expression of hopeless and incurable grief. Those who have been already cleaned look on with delight at the screaming farce, while those who are waiting wear a becoming aspect of enormous gravity. The old lady, however, has her joke, too, which is to cuff every youngster before she lets it go ”

“ But you must not watch a monkey too long at a time, or it will be certain to abuse your curiosity by flippant conduct, and the illusion of respectability will be at once destroyed. Turn for a moment to any family of monkeys, and for a time nothing can be more becoming than their behavior. The young ones romp, while the old one, discountenancing such frivolity, sits severely on a perch, turning every now and then to look out wistfully over the spectators’ heads at the bright sun shining out of doors. ”

“ This possession of each other is, by the way, a curious feature of monkey life, for they seem to hold their fur in common. No one individual may take himself off to the top of the cage, and say, “You shan’t scratch me,” for his skin belongs to all his neighbors alike, and if a larger monkey than himself expresses a wish to scratch him, the smaller must at once turn over on his back and submit to the process. Nor is it etiquette to refuse one’s self to be scratched by another of equal size; and Indeed, without derogation of dignity, a larger may abandon the surface of his stomach to a smaller. ”

“ They, no doubt, remark that our faces are usually characterized by a senseless smile, and, full of lofty pity for us, wonder at creatures that can thus pass their days in causeless mirth, and differ so much in their fur and feathers that it is nothing short of a marvel that they ever distinguish each other’s species. While we, the spectators, are moralizing over the divine honors of the ape in the Past, and his fallen state, the ape of the Present sits puzzling over the man of the Future. ”

“ The old monkey, lately so solemn, so respectable, so care-worn, has suddenly resolved itself into an irresponsible fool, committing itself to every possible absurdity, and subjected to the irreverent liberties of its juniors. ”

“ In time the smaller one is soothed, and lies down so flat that it looks at last like a monkey-skin stretched out on the straw, while the larger, with an elaborate affectation of studious interest, searches each tuft of fur. ”

“ The thought, however, is hardly past before the monkey, with a velocity that suggests an explosion from below, springs to the roof, carrying with her as much of the bed as her four hands can hold, and in the next instant is down again and spinning round and round on the bare floor in pursuit of her own tail, while the straw comes straggling down upon her silly old head from the perch above. The creature has suddenly, to all appearance, become a hopeless idiot! ”

“ For want of absolute contradiction or confirmation we human beings have to hold our decision in abeyance, but why should the monkeys have any doubt about the connecting link?
What a work might be written, both horrible and grotesque, about all the ape-men or man-apes that have been introduced by travellers to the notice of the world! Science, it is true, ignores them all, but Fancy, I think, gets along better without Science. ”

“ It is just the same in the next cage, and the next, and the next. Intervals of profound contemplation and admirable gravity alternate with fits of irrelevant frivolity; and it is just these extraordinary alternations of conduct and demeanor that make monkeys metaphysics. There is no arguing from probabilities with them, or concluding from premises. It is always the unforeseen that occurs. ”

“ A monkey suggests something more than matter. There is a suspicion of mind about the creature that prevents one thinking idly, and all its problems seem somehow or another to resolve themselves into human questions of psychology or ethics. Many of their actions require a rational explanation, and, though each one may be turned off with a laugh, the gravity of the monkey will tell in the long-run, and the looker-on will find himself at last speculating as to whether and if, and hesitating as to the neuter genders of pronouns being proper to be used when speaking of monkeys. ”

“ If pedigree and lofty traditions could make any creatures proud, surely the monkeys should be proud, for their history runs back without a fault to the heroic times when their ancestors, living in the very hills which the monkey-folk still haunt, were the allies of the gods, and their chiefs were actually gods themselves. ”

“ We, on the one hand, remark the pensive demeanor of the four-handed folk, and sympathize with the unknown causes of their melancholy, — are amused by their irrational outbreaks of frivolity and scandalized by their sudden relapses from an almost superhuman gravity and self-respect into monkey indecorum and candor. ”

“ It is impossible to speak with disrespect of animals having such antecedents; and, besides, this monkey before you knows perhaps a secret that science cannot find out — the secret of the Sources of the Nile. As he passes by, a tail hanging down from the perch above him attracts his notice, and pulling it, he brings down upon himself a monkey smaller than itself, which had thought itself concealed, but had forgotten its dependent tail. ”

“ The women are all here again, drawing the water for the day, and the monkeys sit and wait, the old ones in the front, sententious and serious, and the youngsters rolling about in the dust behind them, till at last some girl sees the creatures waiting, and “in the name of Ram” spills a lotah full of water in a hollow of the ground, and the monkeys come round it in a circle and stoop down and drink, with their tails all curled up over their backs like notes of interrogation. ”

“ It is difficult enough to catch a monkey’s eye, but to catch one of its ideas is impossible. Neither in look nor in mind will it positively confront man, but just as it lets its eye pass over his, yet never rest upon it full, so its “mind” glances to one side or the other of the human intelligence, but never coincides with it. [1] It may be that they were once all human, that the link still exists, and that in time all will be human again ”

“ But outside of Asia the monkey has never become a friend, even though we have adopted him as a relative. Literature has nothing to his credit, and Art ignores him. In olden times they never took augury from a monkey, and nowadays no one even takes it for armorial bearings. ”

“ The skulls, at any rate, have been proved to be human, and the teeth are some of them human, too; but if the tough skin, thickly set with close gray hair came off the body of a man or a woman, he or she must have been of a species hitherto unknown to science. For as yet no family of our race has confessed to a soft gray fur, nearly an inch long in parts and inclining to white at the tips. Yet such is the skin of the Soko, the creature whose skull Professor Huxley says is human. ”

“ Everything, we are told, is inherited. The farmyard goats, when doing nothing else, still perch themselves on the highest point of the bank they can find, or on the wall, because their wild ancestors used once upon a time to stand on the hill peaks, as sentinels for the herd, to watch for the hunter and the eagle and the lynx. ”

“ If the corn is ripe they can soon eat enough for the day; but, if not, they go wandering about picking up morsels, here an insect and there a berry, till the sun gets too hot, and then they creep up into the dark shade of the mango tops and snooze through the afternoon. ”

“ The other is that there actually does exist in the centre of the Dark Continent a race of forest men so degraded and brute-like that even the cannibals living on the outskirts of their jungles really think them to be something less than human, and as such hunt them and eat them. Either theory suffices to supply the missing link, for if it be true that the skulls of the Soko are human skulls — and that the Soko skin belongs to, the Soko-skulls — then the tribes of the Livingstone have among them a furry-skinned race of men that feed by night and have no articulate speech. ”

“ While we are commiserating the monkeys on their narrow escape from human intelligence, the monkeys are wondering how long it will be before men grow wise enough to use their tails instead of hiding them, and see the folly of keeping two of their hands in boots. ”

“ A forward child gets a box on the ear, perhaps, but each one, as it has satisfied its thirst, steps quietly out of the circle and wipes its mouth. The day thus fairly commenced, they go off to see what luck may bring them. ”

“ Then one by one the whole family come slipping down the tree-trunk, and they all yawn and look about and scratch. But they are sleepy and peevish, and the youngsters get cuffed for nothing, and begin to think life dull. ”

“ Man himself would, I believe, be glad, in his present advanced state of sympathetic civilization, to admit the monkey’s claim to alliance with himself; for it is a fact that our race finds a pleasure in referring loftily to the obscurity of its own origin, and feels a natural pride in having raised itself above its fortunes. ”

“ If, on the other hand, these furred creatures are so like monkeys that even savages cannot recognize their humanity, and yet so like men that even Professor Huxley cannot recognize any trace of monkey in their skulls, the person called the Soko must be a very satisfactory missing link indeed; for it is essential in such a person that he should so nearly resemble both his next of kin as to be exactly assignable to neither. ”

“ As Darwin tells us, they catch colds and die of consumption, suffer from apoplexy and from cholera, inflammation, cataracts, and so forth, can pass on a contagious affection to men, or take the sickness from them, eat and drink all that human beings do, and suffer from surfeits precisely as men and women do ”

“ Hindoos do not hurry themselves in anything they do, but the monkey has lots of time to spare and plenty of patience, and in the end, after the crow has stolen a little, and the dog has had its morsel, and the children are all satisfied, the poor fragments of the meal are thrown out on the ground for the bhunder-logue, the monkey-people ”

“ While we outside are noting the unformed heel, the leg without a calf, the lines of the skeleton that prevent an erect attitude, they within have observed that human beings cannot run up the wire netting, or swing by their tails on the railings ”

“ They assist at the convocation of the elders and the romps of the children, looking on when the faquir comes up to collect his little dues of salt and corn and oil, and from him in their turn exacting a pious toll. They listen gravely to the village musician till they get sleepy, and then, one by one, they clamber up into the peepul. ”

“ Perhaps they may have a lingua franca among themselves, but against man they conspire together to be dumb; provoking him to speculation by imitating human manners, and then frustrating all his conclusions by suddenly lapsing — into monkeys. ”

“ In the next place, there is a subjective difficulty, for in thinking about monkeys the mind cannot relax itself as it would in thinking about cats or parrots, nor get into undress over it as it might over a more trifling subject. ”

“ The result of their generous labors has been the collection of as wholesome a set of monsters as could have been wished; gravitating, moreover, as it is right they should, towards mankind, until, indeed, they actually merge in humanity. Professor Owen, who wages desperate war, and very properly, against the existence of all things of which he has not seen a bit, refuses, of course, to admit the last gradation altogether. But Professor Huxley, who, I believe, is really in his heart of hearts pining secretly for a tailed man to be found, laughs to scorn the dry theory of the hippocampus minor ”