THE MONKE V FA MIL Y. 145 



tends. For want of original documents concerning its ancestors, 

 we must have recourse to speculation in order to obtain a faint ray 

 of light upon the history of an animal whose habits, in one or two 

 respects, differ widely from tho? ^ of all other apes in the known 

 world. Let us imagine then, that, in times long gone by, the pre- 

 sent Rock of Gibraltar was united to the corresponding mountain 

 called Ape's Hill, on the coast of Barbary; and that, by some 

 tremendous convulsion of nature, a channel had been made between 

 them, and had thus allowed the vast Atlantic Ocean to mix its 

 waves with those of the Mediterranean Sea. If apes had been on 

 Gibraltar when the sudden shock occurred, these unlucky mimickers 

 of man would have seen their late intercourse with Africa for ever 

 at an end. A rolling ocean, deep and dangerous, would have con- 

 vinced them that there would never be again another highway over- 

 land from Europe into Africa at the Straits of Gibraltar. Now, so 

 long as trees were allowed to grow on the Rock of Gibraltar, these 

 prisoner-apes would have been pretty well off. But, in the lapse of 

 time and change of circumstances, forced by " necessity's supreme 

 command," for want of trees, they would be obliged to take to the 

 ground on all-fours, and to adopt a very different kind of life from 

 that which they had hitherto pursued. During the short period of 

 winter in Gibraltar the weather is often cold and raw ; most unge- 

 nial, one would suppose, to the ordinary tempreament of a monkey 

 tribe, left prisoners on the solitary rock, and for ever prohibited from 

 following the retiring sun in his journey to Capricorn, after he has 

 paid his annual visit to the tropic of Cancer. It must have cost 

 many years of painful endurance to have enabled animals so sus- 

 ceptible of cold as monkeys are, to preserve existence in such an 

 uncongenial situation until the sun, returning from the southern 

 hemisphere, could accommodate them with a sufficient supply of 

 warmth. Be this as it may, there still exists on Gibraltar's tower- 

 ing mountain a small colony of apes, which, although in want of 

 space to range in, seems never to have passed the neutral ground 

 between the fortress and the realms of Spain. So that, up to the pre- 

 sent time, history has no documents to show that apes have ever been 

 found wild in any other part of Europe. During the short peace of 

 Amiens, at the commencement of the present century, on visiting 



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