116 YERTEBRATA. 



as a man rides a horse, or better, and are most excellent jockeys ; but, after all, they arc only like 

 the worst of the human species. If all the qualities of the monkeys are put together, they consti- 

 tute what is called ill-nature; and if any person would know what an ill-natured man is, that man 

 is a monkey to all intents and purposes, with tin; addition of reason, which makes his character 

 much worse, with the loss of religion and conscience, which is worst of all; for without these, 

 reason i> rather a disadvantage." 



In the light in which we regard this sermon on monkeys by the preacher, it is, as we have said, 

 alike significant and instructive, if it were to be taken as a serious homily against the four- 

 handed family who are the subject of it, it would be both unjust and injurious. We must receive 

 Nature's works as she made them, and judge them accordingly. The baboon with his snout 

 painted sky-blue, and declaring it to be "neat, not gaud_\," bad just as good a right to insist 

 up. >n his pre-Raphaeliteism as Mr. Buskin has upon his — the whole thing being a mere matter of 

 taste. 



Let us always start fair >n our estimates of the brute creation, taking good Dr. Watts for a 



guide : 



" Let (.log* delight to bark and bite, 

 For God hath made them so; 

 Let bears and lions growl and tight, 

 For 'tis their nature too." 



h, indeed, we persist in denouncing the monkeys as a thievish, fickle, and disgusting race, and 

 thus bring them to trial under a code which they cannot comprehend, let us see how the tables 

 may be — nay, perhaps are — turned upon us. 



We are told that some of the tribes of South American howlers which we have described in the 

 preceding pages hold mass meetings, in which one of the monkeys takes an elevated position, 

 from which, as from a desk or a rostrum, he harangues the assembly. Travelers who have wit- 

 nessed these scenes, all speak of the ludicrous resemblance in such cases to certain human exhi- 

 bitions, as well on the part of the orator as the listeners. It would not require a great stretch of 

 imagination to suppose that human beings are sometimes the theme of their discourses; nor would 

 it be difficult to imagine the figure they would make in these "Moral Estimates of Men in a 

 Monkey point of view." To these creatures mankind must be chiefly known as shooting them 

 down — wounding, mangling, destroying them — often in mere wantonness of sport, often for the 

 cannibal desire of devouring them, often for the purpose of carrying them into captivity, and 

 often in vindication of that hereditary contempt and spite which every race of man indulges 

 against all other races that resemble it and yet are not of it. To the monkeys, man must be a 

 butcher, a cannibal, a thief, a robber, a disturber of the peace, a tyrant, an enslaver, — in short, the 

 incarnate devil ; and we may therefore easily fancy that, in the howling eloquence of monkey 

 stump-orators, he is often used as a climax to "point a moral or adorn a tale." The intense agita- 

 tion, the uncontrolable terror, the bitter hate, displayed by bowlings and hissings, groanings and 

 gruntings, on the part of a community of monkeys, when a man happens to invade their forest 

 sanctuaries, sufficiently attest the instinctive horror they entertain of a family that, of all the 

 world, have the greatest resemblance to themselves. 



One thing more, as faithful historians, we are bound to state, showing that the ancestry of the 

 monkeys takes precedence of that of Man. Mrs. Ilowitt, in the lines we have quoted, seems t" 

 imagine that the monkeys were created about the time of Adam and Eve; but this is a mistake 

 Long, long ages before man became an inhabitant of the earth, apes and monkeys — diversified in 

 form, and multitudinous in number — had frisked and frolicked upon its surface. The fossil re- 

 mains of these creatures are found abundantly in different quarters of the globe — not in pr< 

 tropical countries only, but even in England and France, and in situations which cany back their 

 exi-tence to the dim and distant eras of the world when these countries were covered with a tropi- 

 cal vegetation, aud monsters now extinct sported in their forests and in their waters. 



