THE MONKE Y FAMIL Y. 1 87 



the reader should ever chance to dip into my autobiography, which 

 he will find in the " Essays on Natural History," he will there learn 

 the vast difference there is betwixt a tender toe and a tough one. 

 He will see how severely I got punished, by rashly presuming that 

 my feet (after I had now worn shoes for twenty years) were in the 

 same hardened state as they formerly had been, when, by going 

 barefoot, they had become callous, and could support me with 

 impunity, as I wandered through the asperities of a tropical forest. 

 I have no doubt but that, if a soft and tender-footed orang-outang 

 from Borneo had accompanied me that morning to Rome, he would 

 have been equally disabled and footsore. Custom, they say, is 

 second nature ; still custom, when I contemplate the singular forma- 

 tion of all the four limbs of a monkey, will never adapt them, in my 

 opinion, to perform the task of a long journey on the ground. But 

 it is almost time to close this little treatise, in which I have carefully 

 abstained from looking on the monkey family with a scientific eye, 

 merely confining myself to show, that the outward formation of a 

 monkey's limbs, disables it, in a great measure, from living on the 

 ground, whilst the forests of the tropics hold out to it an everlasting 

 convenience for the gratification of its appetites aye, for millions 

 upon millions of individuals which can spend their whole lives upon 

 these trees, in freedom and in safety. 



I willingly resign to our grave masters in the school of zoology 

 the sublime task to show cause why a monkey, approaching so near 

 to man externally, should be internally as far distant from him as the 

 mule itself is, or the mule's father, the ass. When they shall have 

 enlightened us on this point, I will courteously ask them to explain 

 why one cow has horns and another none ? Why does a dog lap 

 water and a sheep drink it ? Why has the horse the large warts on 

 the inside of his legs ? Why does cock-robin sing for twelve months 

 consecutively, whilst his companion, the chaffinch, warbles but half 

 the time ? 



Leaving, then, these gordian knots to be unravelled by more 

 expert hands than mine, I must beg permission to repudiate the 

 accounts which have reached us of apes armed with clubs, and of 

 their assaulting men in the forests; of apes taking young black ladies 

 up to the tops of the trees, and persuading them to join company for 



