One day he came and she was not there; at least she was not visible; but, concealed in a neighboring thicket, she watched the effect of her absence. The hippopotamus arrived as usual, and looked for her at her accustomed seat. Not seeing her, he came fully out upon the shore and gazed around. He trotted heavily about, peering inquisitively from his little eyes. He sniffed the air, but the wind blew from the shore, and she remained undiscovered. Deprived of his audience, his performances that day were brief and spiritless, and he soon sought the bottom of the lagoon. The next day she was there, and he trotted directly up to her. But she rose and walked shyly away, keeping her eyes softly bent upon him. He approached quickly; but at once she fled away at a pace that defied pursuit; for she was much the nimbler. At a convenient distance, she paused and made eyes at him. Seeing that he could not overtake her, he went back into the water. She returned to her post of observation, when he began those performances which the Darwin says the male always goes through to please and win the female. He bellowed and gnashed his teeth, he rolled over and over in the mud and water, in the most captivating manner. He went into deeper water and lashed about in it until he made it boil like a pot. In vain; she sat immovable, although she continued her pensive gaze; and when he again approached her she fled, and this time actually vanished from his sight. The next day both were there again, and he repeated his performance. Again she was charmed, but still unyielding. In a frenzy of repressed hippopotamic feeling, he approached her; and, could he believe his little eyes? she did not flee. He wiggled his tiny tail with the rapidity of a Yankee clock’s pendulum, all unconscious that he was thus attracting attention to the greatest, although the least conspicuous, of his charms. All at once, fired and stimulated by vanity and love, it occurred to him that if he could and should exhibit himself in a position and with a movement more like her own, he would be irresistible. He had observed that she walked chiefly upon her hind legs; and he therefore determined to approach her walking upon his. He heaved himself upward two or three times with difficulty, and without success; for he was one of the heavy fathers of his clumsy race. But at last he attained his end, and approached her, walking in a ponderous imitation of her own graceful gait. It was an awful and overpowering exertion. The great historian of the fallen race of Darwin, one of them called Gibbon, did not have a more trying task when he bent his hippopotamic figure, and knelt before his beloved one, who was obliged to call her servants to help him up. He was paid only with a peal of laughter; but our ponderous ancestor was rewarded by seeing on the face of his charmer a pensive and delighted smile. It roused him to an exertion almost incredible. Inflamed with love, and his vanity tickled to the point of frenzy, he did what the Darwin says all lovers do to win their loves, he danced. Moving slowly and stiffly at first, he soon launched into a break-down that was a marvel to all living creatures. With jaws wide open, and nostrils distended, he thundered about the shore, flinging his forefeet into the air with frantic and gigantic abandonment. If one of his hind legs stuck deep in the soft margin of the pool, and interrupted his performance, it was but for a moment; he drew it out with a suddenness and force that made a report that startled all the birds within a mile, and plunged again into his amorous saltation. It was the most tremendous pas seul ever executed. At last he stopped, panting; and, plumping down upon his knees, joined his fore-paws in supplication. Of course our ancestress then yielded—so the Darwin says that no female can resist a dancing lover—and in due time she was rewarded by the appearance of a little gorilla with a tail so small as to be hardly visible.
The event stirred our community far more than if the bantling had been born without a head. The mothers of newly-born gorillas, with the old-fashioned tail, undertook at first to decry the peculiar feature of the new-comer. But this effort, although natural, was in vain; and in brief, the little tail now, like the great tail in earlier ages, became the fashion, and carried all before it. The hippopotamus, although, I am sorry to say, he was already married, and the father of a family, was persuaded by other lady gorillas to illustrate the great principle of sexual selection. Many other hippopotamuses were led astray, to the great disturbance of the connubial depths of the lakes and rivers of that region; and the result was that in the course of a generation or two the great tails had disappeared, and the story of their origin came to be regarded as an old wive’s fable.
For a very considerable time—I will not undertake to say how many hundred thousand years; and in such matters a hundred thousand years or so is a mere trifle—gorillas had little tails: now they have none. It has been supposed by a predecessor of the Darwin that these tails were worn off by being sat down upon, and so gradually disappeared at once from the face of the earth and the back of the gorilla. I am not prepared to say, at this stage of the inquiry into the theory of development, that such an abatement of our caudal appendages was not possible. But I deal here with facts, not with fancies; and, in fact, such was not the manner of their disappearance; for, indeed, the tails were so very small, and tucked themselves away so very closely and comfortably when we sat down, that the friction necessary to their abatement was never effectually established. It happened through another manifestation of the principle of sexual selection, and in this wise.
A lady gorilla—a young matron, who was generally believed to have her husband very well in hand, partly from his devotion to her, but chiefly through her selfish indifference to him, and who found herself for the second time in that interesting situation which gives every female who considers herself a lady the right to insist upon the gratification of her slightest whim and most fanciful caprice—took a notion that she must eat the soft parts of a very tender young crocodile. She thought that the high musky flavor of such a tit-bit would be of great benefit to her; and, indeed, she threatened that if it were not forthcoming she would surely produce, not a gorilla, but a crocodile, or, at the very least, a gorilla with scales and a long, thick tail. Her husband was a great fisherman, and she sent him out to catch for her the much-desired dainty. He fished all day with fisherman’s luck. He had many exciting nibbles, and some very promising bites, but no baby crocodile. The shades of night were falling fast, and he found that his bait was all gone. He dreaded the scene that would ensue upon his appearance without the object of his lady’s longings. What should he do? In his desperation a bright thought occurred to him. There was his own tail. It was his last chance, and the method was unheard of; but the emergency was great, and he was willing to submit to almost any sacrifice, even that of mutilation, rather than appear empty-handed before the mistress of his affections and his household. He cut off his tail, put it on his fish-bone hook as if he loved it (which he did), and made his last cast, comforting himself as much as he could with the consciousness that, at least, he could come before his longing lady, saying, “I have done what I could,” and being able to show proof of his words. To his delight and surprise, it proved a very killing bait. An infant crocodile, that had just then gone out, in defiance of her mother’s commands, who had warned her particularly against gorillas’ tails, saw this one sink slowly down to her, twiddling invitingly through the twilit water. She thought that she would eat one only this once, just to see how it tasted, and would never do so again. She sprang at it, and was instantly drawn screaming and wriggling out of the water, and the gorilla took her home triumphantly to his expectant spouse, telling her of his sacrifice. Her whim had changed; and the odor that she had so longed for filled her with loathing. But the consciousness that the thing had cost her husband his tail gave it a relish in what she called her heart, if not to her palate, and she managed to eat a morsel.
The next day the remains of the disobedient crocodile child were displayed in her cave, and she told to her gossips the story of the tribute to her charms. She was filled with exultation, and they were stung with envy. She took airs upon herself. She was a wife for whom her husband would stop at no sacrifice, not even that of the appendage to his seat of honor. This could not be borne. The other ladies felt humiliated; and soon several of them were seized with a longing like to hers for a baby crocodile, to be captured in the same manner. One entrapped, or caught with any other bait, would not answer the purpose. Why prolong the recital? The husbands yielded; the bait still proved taking; and the pride of the ladies was fed, if not their appetites. Soon it became an understood thing that any gorilla who was worthy the name of husband and father would sacrifice his tail to provide newly-born crocodiles for his wife; and ere long there was not a masculine tail to be seen in the community. The natural consequences ensued, as the Darwin has explained; and thus, by the operation of the laws of development and of sexual selection, the gorilla became again a tailless animal.
Through these vicissitudes, my esteemed quadrumanous hearers, our race has passed in consequence of the weakness and the caprice of that lovely and enchanting sex whose errors we are always so ready to forgive, in consideration of their charms. [Here it was observed that the female gorillas bridled and cast side glances at the males, and chattered in low tones to each other. A few of the ugliest broke out into applause, which was quickly frowned down by the leading matrons, and laughed at by the beauties of the younger sort.] And now let me warn my young female friends against that curse of their sex, the temptation to make low marriages and to form disreputable connections with extravagant and wheeling strangers. There is no surer way to destroy their peace of mind and to ruin their prospects in life. [Here a hum of approval was heard from the matrons, at which the younger belles giggled, tossed their heads, and turned up their noses. One of them, a pert minx, evidently a gorilla girl of the period, had the audacity to call out, “I say, old buffer, how about that hippopotamus?” But the lecturer did not reply, and went on with his subject.] This failing is not peculiar to the females of our noble race. The Darwin tells us that it is found in the dog family. But what might not be looked for in the habits of such low people, who go about continually upon all fours, without raising themselves occasionally as we do on their posterior extremities; who have no thumbs on their hind feet, and who have tails, and not only have them, but wag them, with delight in their possession. The Darwin says that the females of the dog family (he gives them a name, I am sorry to say, which would bring a blush to the cheek of innocence, and which therefore I shrink from uttering, and so I use another term that means the same thing)—well, he tells us that the lady-dogs “are not always prudent in their loves, but are apt to fling themselves away on curs of low degree. If reared with a companion of vulgar appearance” [here the lecturer drew himself up, passed one hand through his hair, and with the other stroked his whiskers], “there often springs up between the pair a devotion which no time can afterward subdue. The passion, for such it really is, becomes of a more than romantic endurance.”[[3]] Could there be a more effectual warning against the dangers of propinquity and the folly of what simpletons call disinterested affection!