COMIC ZOOLOGY.
THE MONKEY TRIBE.
Of this genus there are countless varieties, differing widely in the cut of their monkey jackets, as the untravelled American naturalist will doubtless have observed on traversing his native sidewalk. The educated specimens met with in our cities are upon the whole well Organized, and appear to have music in their soles. For its feats à pied, the tame monkey is indebted to a Piedmontese who accompanies him.
To behold the monkey race in their glory, however, they must be seen in their native woods, where they dwell in genteel independence, enjoying their entailed estates and living on their own cocoa nuts. There will be found the Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall when yielding the Palm to some aspiring rival is swifter than that of the Roman Empire; the Barberry Ape, so called from feeding exclusively on Barberries; the Chimpanzee--an African corruption of Jump-and-see, the name given to the animal by his first European discoverers in compliment to his alertness; the Baboon, a melancholy brute that, as you may observe from his visage, always has the blues; to say nothing of a legion of Red Monkeys, which are particularly Rum Customers.
Some men of science have advanced the theory that man is the climactic consequence of innumerable improvements of the monkey; the negro as he now exists being the result of the Fifteenth Amendment. These philosophers erect a sort of pyramid of progress, placing an Ape at the base and a Caucasian at the Apex. This wild hypothesis of a monkey apotheosis can of coarse only be regarded Jockolarly, in other words, with a grin. Nevertheless the Marmozet is sufficiently like a little Frenchwoman to be called a Ma'amoiselle, and there are (in New-Zealand for instance) human heathen with a craving for the Divine, to whom the Gorilla, though not a man, is certainly a brother. Possibly the Orang Outang, if able to express his thoughts in an harangue, might say with Mr. DICKENS, "I am very human." He certainly looks it.
There is a strong facial resemblance among the simious races--Simia Similibus. This likeness does not, however, extend in all cases to the opposite extremity. Some monkeys have no tails. Of the tailless Apes it is said that they originally erased their rear appendages by too much sitting--perhaps as members of the "Rump" in some Anthropoid Congress. Be that as it may, the varieties that have retained their tails seem disposed to hang on to them, and will doubtless continue to do so by hook or by crook.
The natives of Africa believe that the monkeys would converse with them if they were not afraid of being set to work; but it is quite apparent that they are not averse either to labor or conversation, inasmuch as among themselves they frequently Mow and Chatter.