Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/249

Rh into monkeys, in punishment for their wickedness. They had broken the Sabbath by fishing. Some of their pious fellow-citizens endeavored in vain to convey them back into the path of virtue; and, finally, when all admonitions proved useless, left the town. Returning to their homes three days later, they found, instead of their neighbors, baboons, which met them looking sorrowfully, and expressing by signs and attitude that they recognized the friends whose advice they had scorned with so dreadful a result. In his anger, Allah had inflicted a terrible sentence upon them." The writer carefully insists on the circumstance that the culprits were Jews.

The Prophet and his followers admit this metamorphosis by God's special intervention as a fact, and this fully explains the prominent part assigned to apes in all Arabic fables and tales. The early Egyptians believed religiously that some groups of monkeys were experts in writing, and, by that fact alone, equal if not superior to mankind in general. A number of apes were consequently sheltered and fed in the temples, worshiped during life, and embalmed after death. Those privileged specimens of the four-handed tribe, when first introduced into the temple, were handed a slate and pencil by the chief-priest, and humbly requested to show their right to admission into the sacred asylum by writing. The gamboling and grinning candidates wrote, and nobody ever doubted that the figures traced by their agile hands fully deserved to be classed in the category of hieroglyphs. So highly were they held in respect and veneration, that the holy Sphinx was represented with their hair-dress, and, till to-day, men and women in the country of the Mahdi give their hair the same shape. But the Egyptians never admitted that the priests or Pharaohs were the descendants of monkeys, while, on the contrary, the Hindoos built houses and temples to shelter and worship apes, and venerated the princes of their country as the direct offspring of the holy animals. The Arabs regard the latter as "the descendants of the wicked, to whom nothing is sacred, nothing respectable, nothing too good or too bad; who never feel friendly dispositions for other creatures of the Lord, and are damned by Allah, and carry the likeness of the devil and of man combined on their ill-shaped bodies."

We, the sons of civilization, agree up to a certain point with the Arabs. We also—at least that portion of modern society who have not been given an education or an overtraining in physical science—decline to see in apes anything more than caricatures of ourselves, and repudiate with much aversion the inferences drawn from Darwin's theory. On the other side, highly educated men all over the world have opened the discussion of the relationship between man and monkey, and speaking about the latter nowadays has become a dangerous task, in so far as there is but one alternative left—to offend the ancestry or the offspring! For my own part, I feel no hesitation in approaching the question of relationship to examine its