Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/259

Rh made up; he touched her cheek with one finger and then offered her his hand in friendship. My chimpanzee conversed very little with other animals; like the apes in general, he was afraid of the big ones and despised the smaller ones. He was always around us, and we, on our side, did not make any difference between him and a man.

The animal fell ill of mumps, followed by pneumonia. I had seen many sick chimpanzees, but never one of them behaved as he did. I engaged two competent physicians to take charge of him. He knew them from the first day, allowed them to feel his pulse, showed his tongue, and directed the hand of the attendant doctor to the painful swelling, which had to be cut open afterward, there being danger of suffocation. The doctors would not use chloroform, out of regard to the affection of the lungs; but, fearing the chimpanzee would not keep quiet during the operation, engaged four strong men to hold him. The sick animal did not submit to that rough treatment, but excitedly pushed the men aside, and then, without any compulsion whatever, but in compliance with the fondling words of his nurse, in whose lap he was sitting, offered his throat. The operation was performed, the ape never flinching or complaining. He felt afterward much relieved, and expressed his gratitude by pressing fervently the hands of the physicians and kissing his nurse. But his life was not spared; he died from pneumonia. Meekly and patiently he bore his long agony and died more like a man than an animal. The doctor told me that never in his life, at any death-bed, had he felt an emotion similar to that which seized him at the humble couch of the poor monkey. In Berlin, many beautiful eyes shed tears when the news of the sad end of my widely known and generally petted chimpanzee was spread.

Was the ancestor of the human race a monkey? That is the vexed question which still raises so much dust.

There is no doubt that man is not more and not less than the chief creature in the animal kingdom, and that the monkeys are his immediate neighbors; but I can not see why this fact should logically involve the assumption that our great-great-uncles were gamboling in paradise in the shape of apes. The doctrine of gradual evolution may seem trustworthy in the highest degree and beautiful from the scientific standpoint, but it is based upon a simple hypothesis, and a hypothesis is not a proof; and here I wish not to be misunderstood. Even if the physical and intellectual development and perfection of humanity throughout the succession of thousands of centuries is a fact, there is no authority for the inference that, eo ipso, a monkey-nest was the cradle of mankind.

Darwin's treatise on the variation of species gave rise to the ardent controversy of our days. Darwin used the wrong word. It is not "species" he ought to have said, but "varieties"; for species never interbreed with each other. Man and monkey, though belonging to the same group, represent two distinct species. There is, consequently,