The second species of anthropoid apes is the chimpanzee. The full-grown animal of this species is smaller than the adult gorilla. An aged male chimpanzee has broad, rather rounded shoulders, a powerful chest, long muscular arms reaching to the knees, and a long hand, which seems to be very slender in comparison with that of the gorilla. Like the latter animal, he is a denizen of forests, and subsists on wild fruits of various kinds. He lives either in separate families or in small groups of families. Where he inhabits the forest regions of Central Africa, his habits are more arboreal than those of the gorilla; elsewhere, as on the south-west coast, he seems to live more upon the ground. His gait is weak and vacillating, and he can stand erect but a short time. These animals send forth loud cries; and the horrible wails, the furious shrieks and howls that may be heard morning and evening, and often in the night, make these creatures truly hateful to travellers. When chimpanzees are attacked, they strike the ground with their hands, but they do not, as the gorilla does, beat their breasts with their fists. As for the penthouses which Du Chaillu asserts these animals build, Professor Hartmann is somewhat doubtful regarding them. An illustration of this structure, as given by Du Chaillu, has been imitated in London, but this, in Hartmann’s opinion, has been embellished. ‘Koppenfels believes that the so-called penthouse is only the family nest, under which the male places himself; while Reichenfels thinks it possible that some parasitic growth, perhaps a Loranthus, gave rise to the belief that such a penthouse is erected.’
A male chimpanzee, which was kept in the Berlin Aquarium in 1876, was remarkable for his excessive liveliness, and was on particularly friendly terms with a little two-year-old boy, the son of Dr Hermes, the director of the aquarium. ‘When the child entered the room, the chimpanzee ran to meet him, embraced and kissed him, seized his hand and drew him to the sofa, that they might play together. The child was often rough with his playfellow, pulling him by the mouth, pinching his ears, or lying on him, yet the chimpanzee was never known to lose his temper. He behaved very differently to boys between six and ten years old. When a number of schoolboys visited the office, he ran towards them, went from one to the other, shook one of them, bit the leg of another, seized the jacket of a third with the right hand, jumped up, and with the left gave him a sound box on the ear. In short, he played the wildest pranks. It seemed as if he were infected with the joyous excitement of youth, which induced him to riot with the troop of schoolboys.’
One day when Dr Hermes gave his nine-year-old son a slight tap on the head for some blunder in his arithmetic, the chimpanzee, who was also sitting at the table, thought it his duty likewise to show his displeasure, and gave the boy a sound box on the ear. If, again, Dr Hermes pointed out to him that some one was staring or mocking at him, and said: ‘Do not put up with it,’ the creature cried, ‘Oh! oh!’ and rushed at the person in question in order to strike or bite him, or express his displeasure in some other way. When he saw the director was writing, he often seized a pen, dipped it in the inkstand, and scrawled upon the paper. ‘He displayed a special talent for cleaning the window-panes of the aquarium. It was amusing to see him squeezing up the cloth, moistening the pane with his lips, and then rubbing it hard, passing quickly from one place to another.’
Of a female chimpanzee, Massica by name, kept in the Dresden Zoological Gardens, some extraordinary things are told. She was a remarkable creature, not only in her external habits, but in her disposition. ‘At one moment she would sit still with a brooding air, only occasionally darting a mischievous, flashing glance at the spectators; at another she took pleasure in feats of strength, or she roamed to and fro in her spacious inclosure like an angry beast of prey.’ She would sometimes rattle the bars of her cage with a violence that made the spectators uneasy; at other times would claw at people who entered the vestibule of her cage, and try to tear their clothes. She was fond of playing with old hats, which she set upon her head, and if the top was quite torn off, she drew it down upon her neck.
But Massica was frequently ungovernable. She hardly obeyed any one except Schöpf, the director of the gardens; and when in good-humour she would sit on his knee and put her muscular arms round his neck with a caressing gesture. But, in spite of this, he was never quite secure from her roguish tricks. She was able to use a spoon, though somewhat awkwardly; and she could pour from larger vessels into smaller ones without spilling the liquor. If she was left alone for any time, she tried to open the lock of her cage; and she once succeeded in doing so, but on that occasion she stole the key. It was kept hanging on the wall; and she, observing it, took it down, hid it in her armpit, and crept quietly back to her cage. When the occasion served her purpose, with the key she easily opened the lock, and walked out. She also knew how to use a gimlet, to wring out wet clothes, and to blow her nose with a handkerchief. If allowed to do so, she would draw off the keeper’s boots, then scramble with them up to some place out of reach, and, when he asked for them, throw them at his head. She, like the clever gorilla before described, died of consumption. When her illness began, she became apathetic, and looked about with a vacant, unobservant stare. Just before her death, she put her arms round Schöpf’s neck when he came to visit her, looked at him placidly, kissed him three times, stretched out her hands to him, and died. ‘The last moments of Anthropoids,’ remarks our author, ‘have their tragic side!’
Did space permit, we might give many other details of a similar character as to the habits of the orang-utan, the gibbon, and others of the larger apes, both in their wild state and in captivity; but the above are sufficient to illustrate the family to which they belong. A much more interesting matter remains to be considered, namely, what is called the ‘anthropomorphism’ of these creatures, that is, their relation physically to the highest of all the mammalia, man.
Professor Hartmann observes that Huxley’s statement, that the lowest apes are further removed from the highest apes than the latter are from men, is, according to his experience, still perfectly valid. ‘It cannot be denied that the highest order of the animal world is closely connected with the highest created being.’ But it does not follow therefrom that man is descended from apes, or is simply an improved kind of ape. There is, we fear, still prevailing among large sections of intelligent persons the belief that Darwin’s theory was intended to prove that the monkey was the progenitor of man. Of course no one who reads Darwin’s works for himself would ever go away with such a misconception of the whole question. What Darwin’s hypothesis suggested was, not that man was descended from the monkey, but that both man and the monkey may be descendants of a common progenitor, a common type, now extinct, and of which no indisputable traces have yet been found. From this common type, or ground-form, so to speak, the process of development may, according to Darwin, have resulted in two distinct branches or offshoots—the one branch of development ending in the monkey tribe, the other branch ending in man. It is, in the absence of any certain traces of the extinct common type or progenitor, not a subject on which to dogmatise, but is a theory or hypothesis which, in the opinion of Darwin and many other scientists after him, best accounts for the morphological development of man viewed merely from the physical side.
Professor Hartmann admits that his investigations have not brought the problem any nearer to a solution. A baby gorilla is much nearer in physical constitution to a human baby, than the full-grown gorilla is to the mature man; thus indicating that the process of development within the lifetime of an Anthropoid is not in the direction of improvement or further approximation to the human type, but is in the direction of retrogression, or further removal from the human type. ‘A great chasm,’ he says, ‘between Man and Anthropoids is constituted, as I believe, by the fact that the human race is capable of education, and is able to acquire the highest mental culture, while the most intelligent Anthropoid can only receive a certain mechanical training. And even to this training a limit is set by the surly temper displayed by Anthropoids as they get older.’ So that it would seem as if the development of the Anthropoids morally, if we may so use the word here, is, like their physical development, not one of progress or improvement in the individual. These larger apes, therefore, with all their striking resemblances to the human form, are not moving nearer towards Man, but merely remain Man-like.