THE WAYS OF MONKEYS. 235 



morphosed into monkeys, in punishment for their wickedness. They 

 had broken the Sabbath by fishing. Some of their pious fellow-citi- 

 zens endeavored in vain to convey them back into the path of virtue ; 

 and, finally, when all admonitions proved useless, left the town. Re- 

 turning to their homes three days later, they found, instead of their 

 neighbors, baboons, which met them looking sorrowfully, and ex- 

 pressing 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 Egyp- 

 tians believed religiously that some groups of monkeys were ex- 

 perts 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 candi- 

 dates 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 de- 

 scendants 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 noth- 

 ing 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 com- 

 bined 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 Dar- 

 win'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 



