Ape-man

“ There he took up a handful of earth, and pronounced, or rather muttered, some words which I did not understand, and threw it upon me. 'Quit the shape of a man,' said he to me, 'and take on you that of an ape.' He vanished immediately, and left me alone, transformed into an ape, overwhelmed with sorrow in a strange country, and not knowing whether I was near or far from my father's dominions. ”

“ The name ape-man describes him exactly; he was truly intermediate in body structure between the apes and man. He lived 1,000,000 or 2,000,000 years ago. In rocks of just about that same age in England there have been found crudely fashioned flint implements, unnistakably shaped by some intelligent creature with hands so developed as to be capable of holding a stone and striking it with another stone. Modern apes have been observed to hold clubs in their clumsy hands, but none of them can at will touch his thumb against the tip of each finger on the same hand. ”

“ Using his long arms as a man uses crutches, and rolling his huge carcass from side to side with each stride, the great king ape paced to and fro, uttering deep growls, occasionally punctuated with the ear-piercing scream, than which there is no more terrifying noise in all the jungle. ”

“ The ape-man realized that probably for the first time his companion had discovered that he was tailless by nature rather than by accident, and so he called attention to his own great toes and thumbs to further impress upon the creature that they were of different species. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here is a creature not ten thousand generations from the ape, his ancestor. Not ten thousand. And that ape again, not a score of thousands from the monkey, his forebear. A man’s body, his bodily powers, are just the body and powers of an ape, a little improved, a little adapted to novel needs. That brings me to my point. Can his mind and will be anything better? For a few generations, a few hundreds at most, knowledge and wide thought have flared out on the darknesses of life.... But the substance of man is ape still. He may carry a light in his brain, but his instincts move in the darkness. ”

“ Of all animals the Ape most skilfully directs his flight. There is no question that in his intelligence we may find every rudiment of our own; but of all his qualities none more nearly approximates him to us than his courage. There are no animals, not even the great beasts of prey, who are so brave as Man and the Ape, and who are capable of so much presence of mind. It is perhaps this bravery which, joined to his sociability, has most contributed to assure the supremacy of the one. ”

“ If we could free our hands from the manacles of tradition and stand aloof from our prejudices, and look the stern facts in the face, we should be compelled to admit that between man and ape there is such a unity of design, structure and function, that we dare not in the light of reason deny to the ape that rank in Nature to which he is assigned by virtue of these facts. Physiologically, there is no hiatus between man and ape which may not be spanned by such evidence as would be admitted under the strictest rules of interpretation. ”

“ There a man ape stared at another man ape, and bared his fangs in challenge. The white hands of Bentley began to beat the white chest of Bentley—to beat the chest savagely, until the white skin was red as blood....
The Bentley buried within the mighty carcass of an anthropoid ape watched and shuddered. That thing yonder was dressed only in a breech-clout, and the fair flesh was criss-crossed in scores of places with bleeding wounds left by the lash of Barter. The Apeman's brows were [328] furrowed in concentration. The human body made ape-like movements. ”

“ The ape, therefore, notwithstanding his resemblance to the human form, is a brute, and so far from being second in our species, he is not even the first in the order of animals, because he is not the most intelligent among them; therefore it is only on account of the corporeal resemblance that prejudice has been formed in favour of the great faculties of the ape. He resembles man it is said both externally and internally, and therefore he must not only imitate us, but also of his own accord, act in the same manner as we do. ”

“ "What are you, Tarzan?" he asked aloud. "An ape or a man?"
"If you are an ape you will do as the apes would do—leave one of your kind to die in the jungle if it suited your whim to go elsewhere.
"If you are a man, you will return to protect your kind. You will not run away from one of your own people, because one of them has run away from you." ”

“ As the apes became more and more human in the later Meiocene and early Pleistocene ages, they gradually acquired the faculty of acting in concert and of speech; and when, having arrived at that stage of development in which they partook more of the character of savage man than human ape, judgment, recollection, self-consciousness, and, lastly, definite morality manifested themselves, thus raising the ape-like man to the level of the child of two and a half years. ”

“ Some ape has daubed self-conceit over it, and I see nothing else but his bold colours. "He shall not strive nor cry, neither shall any man hear his voice in the street." Where is this quietness and unobtrusiveness in you? ”

“ From such remains it appears that our predecessors were near relatives to the so-called man-apes, the orang outang, chimpanzee, gibbon, and gorilla. Ages passed before these ape-men, in the slow course of evolution, developed into man, distinctly human, though still on a far lower level than any savage people of to-day. ”

“ Between men and apes there exists a line of sharp demarcation."
One of the most recent authoritative publications by a German anthropologist urges that "the apes are to be regarded as degenerate branches of the pre-human stock." This means, in a word, that man is not descended from the ape, but the ape from man. ”

“ In my opinion so little depends on our covering of flesh, that as I have often said, I should instantly acknowledge an ape that could speak, that is, think in concepts, as a man and brother, in spite of his hide, in spite of his tail, in spite of his stunted brain. ”

“ I had encountered the black, hairless, long-tailed ape—things of the mainland—the creatures which Perry thought might constitute the link between the higher orders of apes and man—but these brute-men of Gr-gr-gr seemed to set that theory back to zero, for there was less similarity between the black ape-men and these creatures than there was between the latter and man, while both had many human attributes, some of which were better developed in one species and some in the other. ”

“ For the ape-fool does at least admit that there may be a stronger beast somewhere,—a creature who may suddenly come upon him and end his joys of hanging by his tail to a tree and make havoc of his fruit-eating and chattering, while man thinks there is nothing anywhere superior to himself. ”

“ The other ourang-outang having first of all pulled off my shoes, next amused himself with the ingeniousness of a child who wishes at any cost to discover how it is that his spring doll raises and lowers its arms, by bending my toes backwards and forwards, appearing perfectly astonished and somewhat indignant, that a man was as well formed as an ape. These two terrible valets-de-chambre bent upon bestowing their attentions on my person caused me the most frightful distress ”

“ The only evidence in this argument of analogy, is the similarity of his structure and of his actions to one's own. And if that is good enough to prove that one's fellow-man feels, surely it is good enough to prove that an ape feels. For the differences of structure and function between men and apes are utterly insufficient to warrant the assumption, that while men have those states of consciousness we call sensations, apes have nothing of the kind. Moreover, we have as good evidence that apes are capable of emotion and volition as we have that men other than ourselves are. ”

“ The great apes are usually purchased in their youth and taken aboard merely as a speculation. An adult ape is worth more than a young one, with the [51] result that the chimpanzee or the orang-outang often becomes an occupant of the ship for several years, becoming the mascot and the friend of every man aboard. ”

“ Quoth the ape, ‘O Khelifeh, what wilt thou do with this and with thine ape?’ ‘I will tell thee, O prince of apes,’ answered the fisherman. ‘First, I will cast about to make away with yonder accursed one, my ape, and take thee in his stead and give thee every day to eat of what thou wilt.’ ‘Since thou hast made choice of me,’ rejoined the ape, ‘I will tell thee how thou shalt do, wherein, if it please God the Most High, shall be the mending of thy fortune. Take another cord and tie me also to a tree, where leave me and go to the midst of the dyke and cast thy net into the Tigris. ”

“ But what are these to the clouds of unfortunate adventurers? An ape may generally be considered to be well off if he only loses an eye, like the cheiroped king’s son in the Arabian story, by magical fire. ”

“ In front of him forty or fifty ape-bodies lay in a crushed heap. While yard after yard of the Serpent's bleached length streamed out of the hole, the hundreds of feet of coils already in the clearing suddenly whipped about a whole squadron of ape-men, and with a few constrictions annihilated them as if they had been ants. Across the clearing, the leperous head reared up as high as the trees and swooped down, fangs gleaming. The howls of the ape-men trying to flee, the screams of those who had been caught, rose until they became all one scream. ”

“ They are everywhere! They are so numerous, in fact, that I am almost certain in firing off a gun at hazard, above my head, to bring down an ape.
“I have never seen them so savage before; those which I brought with me from Macao are perfectly civilised beings compared with the apes which we encounter here.” ”

“ The ape resembles man more in his body and limbs than in the use he makes of them. By observing the ape attentively we shall perceive that all his motions are sudden, intermittent, and precipitate; and to compare them with those of man we must suppose a different model. Every action of the ape strongly partakes of his education, which is purely animal ”

“ It may now be interesting, in confirmation of what has been said, to refer to the family life, and, if one may so speak, to the mental and moral life of the anthropoids. Like man, the ape provides with exceeding care for its young, so that its parental affection has become proverbial. Connubial fidelity is a general and well known virtue. The mother ape leads its young to the water, and washes its face and hands in spite of its crying. Wounds are also washed out with water. The ape, when in distress, will weep like a human being, and in a manner that is said to be very affecting. ”

“ Apeman, being but an ape after all, would merely think that he was joining his own kind, bearing with him a mate with white skin.
But to the other apes he would be a human being, a puny hairless imitation of themselves which they would pounce upon and tear asunder with great glee. Apeman would not know this: would not realize his limitations. He would try to take to the upper terraces of the jungle, to swing from tree to tree, carrying his mate—and would find the body of Bentley incapable of supporting such an effort. ”

“ As time passed, the great ape became conscious of a queer, protective impulse that prompted him to search the tree-tops for dangers which might threaten the things below, and which, he was somehow assured, they could not see for themselves. Busy with all this, he forgot—for the first time in his life—to eat, and was downcast when the men began to retrace their steps. He was even a little used to the report of a rifle, having decided that there was no danger unless he could see the strange animals' eyes at the same time. ”

“ But she was still an ape, a huge, fierce, terrible beast of a species closely allied to the gorilla, yet more intelligent; which, with the strength of their cousin, made her kind the most fearsome of those awe-inspiring progenitors of man. ”

“ The brain of the ape was reacting to the suffering of Bentley's body—and a brute was whimpering with its hurts. The advancing apes came to pause. They seemed to stare at one another in amazement. They were suddenly frightened, amazed, unable to understand the thing they saw and were listening to. Bentley crouched there, watching the apes, and he fancied he could understand their sudden new hesitancy.
e did not know, but he guessed that the moans and groans of Apeman were comprehensible to the great apes. They knew that this strangely white creature was an ape, though he looked like a man. ”

“ He has not then, from nature, all those qualifications he appears to possess, but has acquired them from his intercourse with men; he is only more susceptible of tuition than other animals; far from having, like most of them, a disgust for man, his inclination leads him to seek their society: actuated by a desire of pleasing, his tractability, fidelity, constant submission, and that attention necessary to act in consequence of man’s orders, are the result of this natural sentiment.
The ape, on the contrary, is untractable and eccentric ”