116 
YERTEBRATA. 
as a man rides a horsey or better^ and are most excellent jockeys ; but, after all, they are 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-naiui-e ; and if any person would know what an ill-natured man is, that man 
is a monkey to all intents and purposes, with the 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 is rather a disadvantao-e." 
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 serions 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 gaudy," had just as good a right to insist 
upon his pre-Raphaeliteisni as Mr. Ruskin has upon his — the whole thing being a mere matter of 
taste. 
Let us always start fair in our estimates of the brute creation, taking good Dr. Watts for a 
guide : 
" Let dogs delight to bark and bite, I 
Tor G-od hath made them so ; ; 
Let bears5 and lions growl and fight, 
For 'tis their nature too." 
If, indeed, we persist in denouncing the monkeys as a thievish, fickle, and disgusting race, and i 
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 S-oitth American howlers which we have described in the I 
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 i 
it be difficult to imagine the figure they would make in these " Moral Estimates of Men in a \ 
MoNKEV POINT OF VIEW." To thcsc creatuTcs 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 hoAvling eloquence of monkey i 
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 : 
gruutings, 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 I 
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. Howitt, in the lines we have quoted, seems to 
imagine that the monkeys Avere 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 present [ 
tropical countries only, but even in England and France, and in situations Avhich carry back their 
existence to the dim and distant eras of the world when these countries were covered with a tropi- 
cal vegetation, and monsters now extinct sported in their forests and in their waters. 
