ANTHROPOID MYTHOLOGY. 65 5 



stick of carbon glowed brilliantly, and with perfect steadiness. I sub- 

 sequently exhibited this apparatus in the Town-Hall of Birmingham, 

 and many times at the Midland Institute. The only scientific difficulty 

 connected with this arrangement was that due to a slight volatilization 

 of the carbon, and its deposition as a brown film upon the lamp-glass ; 

 but this difficulty is not insuperable. Knowledge. 







ANTHKOPOID MYTHOLOGY. 



By De. B. PLACZEK. 



SHAKESPEARE in one place calls sleep the " ape of death," and 

 thereby gives living expression to an idea which men have at all 

 times entertained of their "nearest relative." As sleep to death, so 

 according to the vulgar view is the ape related to man. Sleep is not 

 quite death, and is no longer conscious life, but is something between 

 the two ; and man learns to regard it as a counterfeit of death. We 

 may say, in general, that wherever men have come into close contact 

 with monkeys they have acquired the same impression of them, that 

 they are a caricature of man, and the idea that they are a not-yet man or 

 a no-longer man, a human likeness of a more primitive design or one 

 that has suffered deformity. All of the more ancient conceptions of 

 the relations between men and apes thus waver between variation and 

 degeneration. The shape which the idea of a community of the two 

 principal families of primates has taken, among the partisans of cre- 

 ation as well as of transformism, can be followed, from divination to 

 empiricism, from superstition to scientific description, and it is not 

 strange that among all the theories of the doctrine of development 

 the so-called " monkey theory " has spread most rapidly and widely. 

 Besides the myths and legends in which the face of an ape now and 

 then appears fables, the fundamental idea of which carried out by 

 skillful and careful minds assumes a scientific value we meet, among 

 the more ancient peoples who made the anthropoid apes the subjects of 

 scientific disputes or invested them with religious or ritual interest, far 

 more important expressions of a supposed relationship of those creat- 

 ures with man. 



The most ancient literature of the Hebrews is eminently a rich and 

 inexhaustible treasury of observations of nature and inquiries into it. 

 We shall first concern ourselves with these, and then draw from 

 Arabian, Egyptian, Indian, ancient Mexican, and other stores, their 

 ape-lore so far as it is of scientific interest and approaches the present 

 conceptions of the nature of apes. Of the joint triennial voyages of 

 the Israelite and I^hoenician fleets to Africa, 1 Kings x, 22, says : 

 " For the king had at sea a navy of Tarshish with the navy of Hiram ; 



