The Scientific Ape

IN A CERTAIN West Indian Isle, there stood a house and hard by a grove of trees. In the house there dwelt a vivisectionist, and on the trees a clan of anthropoid apes. It chanced that one of these was caught by the vivisectionist and kept some time in a cage in the laboratory. There he was much terrified by what he saw, deeply interested in all he heard; and as he had the fortune to escape at an early period of his case (which was numbered 701) and to return to his family with only a trifling lesion of one foot, he thought himself on the whole the gainer.

He was no sooner back than he dubbed himself doctor and began to trouble his neighbours with the question: Why are not apes progressive?

-"I do not know what progressive means," said one, and threw a cocoanut at his grandmother.

-"I neither know nor care," said another, and swung himself into a neighbouring tree.

-"O stow that!" cried a third.

-"Damn progress!" said the chief, who was an old physical-force tory. "Try and behave yourselves better the way you are."

But when the scientific ape got the younger males alone, he was heard with more attention. -"Man is only a promoted ape," said he, hanging his tail from a high branch. "The geological record being incomplete, it is impossible to say how long he took to rise, and how long it might take us to follow in his steps. But by plunging vigorously in medias res on a system of my own, I believe we shall astonish everyone. Man lost centuries over religion, morals, poetry and other fudge; it was centuries before he got properly to science, and only the other day that he began to vivisect. We shall go the other way about, and begin with vivisection."

-"What in the name of cocoanuts is vivisection?" asked an ape.

The doctor explained at great length what he had seen in the laboratory; and some of his hearers were delighted, but not all.

-"I never heard of anything so beastly!" cried an ape who had lost one ear in quarrel with his aunt.

-"And what is the good of it?" asked another.

-"Don't you see?" said the doctor. "By vivisecting men, we find out how apes are made, and so we advance." "But why not vivisect each other?" asked one of his disciples who was disputatious.