The tale has been lately told by one of these very miserable creatures, who, in the depths of his degradation, has yet had the sense to discover his relationship to us, and the grace to be proud of it. Yes, my well-haired friends, a man-animal called the Darwin has had the satisfaction of boasting to his fellows of his descent from the quadrumana. Not only so, he has traced it truthfully, step by step, to our shame and their glory. I shall tell you succinctly and directly what he spreads over a long and tedious narrative, full of assertions, and repetitions, and guesses, which he calls inferences. These are all needless to us; for, as he confesses, and we boast, we comprehend at once by instinct what he and his poor fellows in weakness and ignorance can only grasp by a long and painful process which they call reasoning, by which they are often led into absurdities attainable in no other way.
As you know, the world was made for the gorilla, and when he appeared he was in all the glory of his present strength and beauty. He was the last and highest of Nature’s productions, the ideal creature of the universe. True, there were others larger and stronger—on land and in water—lions, tigers, elephants, and the like, whales, crocodiles, and hippopotamuses; but these were of low caste, creatures with whom he could have no intercourse on terms of equality, and whom he could generally meet only as his natural enemies. For you must have observed that those who are below us hate us; hate us enough at least to rejoice in our downfall, if not to seek our destruction. Usually, too, they devour us, and feed their own life and growth by our extinction.
But the gorilla, too, has had his vicissitudes. Indeed, we may say that, like man, he has had his fall. Unlike man, however, he rose again, until he re-attained his present glorious perfection of form and feature. We fell, my quadrumanous friends, through the frailty and fickleness of the female sex. That charming and no less useful half of our race has also been its bane and its torment for many centuries. To them we owe the humiliating fact that gorillas once had tails, and that some even of our cousins are still afflicted with that ridiculous, although sometimes useful, appendage. I hope that none of those who are present, representing the be-tailed families of our species, will take offence at what I have said. All distinctions founded upon superiority have been done away by the revolutions of late years; and the last change in the fundamental law of our community, I think it was the fifteenth, made the smallest and longest-tailed monkey in Africa—my equal.
But to the story of our tail.
Long ago, so long that the years cannot be numbered upon all the fingers and toes of all the gorillas and monkeys in Africa, a beautiful young lady gorilla was courted by several gentlemen gorillas, some in their earliest youth, some nearer maturity, and some at that period of mature middle age which I—ah have—ah had occasion to observe is not without its peculiar charms to the tender and beautiful of her sex. But none of them found favor with her. She seemed averse to marriage. They went through all those performances which are at once tributes to beauty, and so allurements to its possessors. They danced, they strutted, they howled, they beat their breasts; they ran up the tallest trees and jumped from the tops, landing plump before her at the most unexpected moments, and in the most extraordinary and indescribable positions. They stood on their heads and clapped the palms of their hands and the soles of their feet together, howling at the same time so enchantingly that they could be heard for miles around. One of them even applied the thumb of one distended hand to his nose, and the thumb of his other distended hand to the little finger of the former, and so with the thumbs and fingers of his feet, and grinned in the most bewitching manner. But alas, she sat unmoved before all these demonstrations of strength, agility, and affection. To none of them did she seriously incline. True, there remained untried the form of mingled courtship and marriage, a seizure by main force and an elopement, which has been so common, and which is said to be not without its charms to many of her sex of all races, and in all climes, and which is one of those time-honored institutions, the abrogation of which would seem like the up-heaving of the foundations of society. But her size and her strength were so great that none of her suitors ventured upon this method of courtship; for it was understood that she lacked that willingness to be seized which alone gives this method its charm and its success. In fact, she was the Brunhilda of our race, for whom there were Günthers enough, but no Siegfried. She had let it be understood that if any lover pressed his attentions upon her she would bind his hands and feet together, and, bending down the biggest sapling she could find, tie him to its top and let it spring up with him into the air again. And so she was not molested, and passed through the woods in maiden-meditation, fancy free.
One day she sat upon the sea-shore, lonely and pensive, gazing upon the waters, when suddenly there appeared in the distance an enormous, oval head, with moon-like eyes, followed by many roods of body and tail, that rose and fell like the waves of the ocean. It was the Sea-serpent. She looked at first with wonder, then with curiosity, at last with admiration. What enormous grace of undulation! What seductive sinuosity! What bewildering immensity of horizontal extension! What glistening folds of glairy smoothness! What a piquant difference from the rectangular jointedness, the half-upright attitudes, and the hairy roughness of her obtrusive suitors! As she gazed, her heart told her that she had at last found her affinity. But, overcome although she was, she was also coy. Smitten to her very midriff with love’s dart, she would not, unsought, be won, even by the Sea-serpent. Nor would she be guilty of the impropriety of remaining alone with a member of the opposite sex, to whom she was not married, or even engaged, and indeed a gentleman who had not been properly introduced. She rose with maiden modesty, to walk away. But I am bound to say that her course did not lead her directly from the object which she thought it becoming to leave; rather, it must be confessed, in that oblique line before him, which gave the best opportunity to him of seeing her, and to her of casting glances at him, while she produced the impression that, if not stayed, she would very soon be out of sight. As she moved along the strand, he gazed, and was fascinated, not only by her hairy figure, but by the captivating combination of stride, stumble, and jump, which is the received mode of progression of our noble race. The Sea-serpent was enchanted. The flame was mutual. Nevertheless, after the manner of his sex, he set himself to win what was his already. He went through all his masculine and serpentine performances. He coiled himself up and stretched himself out. He lashed the sea into foam. He came on shore and tied himself up into true lover’s knots before her. He put his tail into his mouth, and rolled himself along the shore in a vast circle, the symbol of the eternity of his love. It seemed as if the very equator had become enamored of her charms, and, refusing any longer to belt the Earth, revolved within the reach of her superior attractions. Finally, by a super-serpentine effort, he stood straight up on the point of his tail, flapping his fins and hissing out his admiration with a noise like that of the Maelstrom. This accomplished his purpose. When she saw him thus reared up, and looking down with such perpendicular enormity of love, from an elevation of some hundred feet, the compliment was more than she could bear. The omnipotence of her charms had turned the equator to the pole; and, satisfied, she yielded. Then he, descending from his height, led her to their nuptial bower, a neighboring cave, nothing loath, but yet with coy, reluctant, amorous delay.[[1]]
[1]. The learned lecturer might here have cited, in support of the truthfulness of this and one or two other passages, Mr. Darwin’s much more impressive, as well as multitudinous, descriptions of what he calls “the act of courtship,” in chapters xiii, and xviii., passim, of “The Descent of Man and Selection in relation to Sex.”
The fruit of these nuptials appeared in due time. As might have been expected, it was a mingling of the traits of the two parents—a gorilla with a tail, which appendage had now been added to one of our race for the first time by the operation of the great principle of sexual selection. At first the tail was looked upon with suspicion, if not aversion. The most respectable matrons of our race scoffed, and sniffed, and turned up their noses at the little stranger. A gorilla with a tail! And they were right; the serpent had indeed entered our Eden. But Brunhilda was devoted to her married Siegfried, and produced at regular intervals new tailed-gorillas; more, the demon of love, or of curiosity, took possession of the young lady gorillas. They were fascinated by this huge Adonis of the deep; and baby gorillas with tails began to come with increasing frequency. The thing became the fashion; and what was at first the fashion, was ere long confirmed by convenience. As the first of this fallen race grew to adolescence, he not only flourished his tail with captivating grace, but he used it in climbing trees; he swam with it; he offered it as bait in the water, and came to shore with a crab or a lobster attached to it, which he ate himself or carried to his mother in triumph. And when at last, having taken to himself two wives, he hung by his tail to the branch of a tree, and grasping a wife by each hind foot, took a cocoa-nut in each hand, and broke them on the heads of the two ladies, doubt and derision were alike abandoned; there went up a howl of admiration, and he was declared to be fittest to survive in the struggle for existence. After this he could have married every lady gorilla in Africa; but there was no need of that. The generation of gentlemen gorillas with tails came rapidly to maturity, and were as rapidly-received into favor by the other sex. It became vulgar to have a lover without a tail, and lady gorillas of any pretentions to social distinction preferred to remain in a state of widowhood, or even of vestal virginity, rather than accept a lover who was not decorated. This went on until at last there were no gorillas without tails, except a few old fogies who took great pains to parade their tailless backs, stroking their sparse white whiskers, and talking of the good old times, when they were young, and no proper young lady gorilla would have looked at a Sea-serpent. But they were only laughed at for their pains.