Apes and Men
THERE appeared in the Times the other day a moving and dignified letter from Sir Hesketh Bell, describing a new method of capturing orang-utans. Nothing can escape the all-knowledge of Homo Sapiens, the demon-divinity of the animal kingdom. The secret of the atom cannot elude him ; the lair of the wildest beast is an open book to him. So it proved in the densest jungle of Sumatra, for his godlike capacity revealed one Of the last refuges of this man-ape, where he was wont to Congregate in family parties. Having discovered their retreat, Sapiens proceeded to ring it round and to frighten hiS relations until they, were herded together within a small area. The trees and scrub were all cut dovin so that only a few were left in the centre for the apes to hide ; in. Theie in theii turn were felled and Caliban and his kind (what was left of them whole, out Of smashed skills and broken limbs) were netted, shut up in boxes where they could not stand upright and 'transported across half the globe to the Riviera.. Forty-fiVe of the survivors finally reached a shop in the TOttenhiliti Cdurt Road. The method of taking the • . • • • orangs was described' as'More humane than that usually followed, much as the rack and thumb-screw might be called a more humane method of making people moral or religious than boiling them in oil. We have heard a great deal for a good many years of " Nature red in tooth and claw," and of the ape and the tiger surviving in our civilized souls. We appear, how- ever, to have discovered an effective means of letting the ape if not the tiger die. Some months ago a further letter appeared in the Times, this time from the late Sir Albert Gray, narrating how the gorillas in their last strongholds in the Congo and Mount Kivu districts were being brought near to extermination ; this time in the cause of science, because it is clear that a stuffed skin in a museum enables our wiseacres to learn more about Nature than does a live animal in its native haunts. Further- more we have become so wise and so very little below the angels that we have begun to devise means of avoiding the most inevitable of all Nature's processes— death, which we mete out to creatures who know nothing of our intellectual aspirations with an unflinching devo- tion to the cause of understanding more about Life. This time it is the third anthropoid, the chimpanzee, who serves by his sacrifice the higher interests of humanity. The forests of Central Africa are being combed of the chimpanzee in order that his glands may rejuvenate old men. Wild animals, of course, belong to us, not to Nature, not to life. We are stronger than they are ; we can kill them so very easily ; we can imprison them for life in iron and concrete cells, we can play tricks with their anatomy on the operating tables ; we can dress them up to resemble drunken sailors. Were they not made for our convenience and pleasure ? If only for the sake of our intellectual pride, however, might we not find a little better use for at least those human-like animals who have only just missed the extraordinary virtue of being men ? In a few years there is little doubt that at the present rate of slaughter and exploitation all the anthropoids will have disappeared for ever from their natural homes. Before we extirpate or shut up the remnants, let us be sure that we sapient beings aremaking the most of them. The last of the gorillas in a mangy skin enclosing sawdust and not moving even by clockwork seems a. poor return for what might have been. The old men revivified by chim- panzee glands—it is unfortunate that that disgruntled Dean should have written so tellingly about the Struld- bruggs. Or the chimpanzee in a red waistcoat and a soldier's cap eating at table, wonderfully entertaining as he is, yet an element of discomfort creeps in as we consider him. The orang-utans behind their bars at the Zoo, the male looking like a disillusioned Eastern sage, so tenderly solicitous of his mate who clasps her dying baby, while both look beyond the sea of gaping faces towards the death which would be less terrifying, fess bewilderingly monstrous to them than their experi- ence of life—is the fun of it quite satisfying enough for us who have climbed from apehood up the Jacob's ladder of evolution ?
There is another consideration—that ape and tiger business. Up to quite recently it was the delight of science to picture man as a ravening beast only to be, restrained from boiling over into his instinctive savageries by the disciplinary force of his laws and institutions. It was all Nature's fault, and so there was some excuse for taking it out of her. The biologists, the zoologists, the psychologists, the anthropologists, and the creeds with them, whatever their differences in other provinces of thought, all joined minds in visiting with contumely. he infantile, the naive, the superannuated adage that the Kingdom of God is within you. Within you a cave- man-devil sat darkling, or a furtive " sinner " or a bucket- ful of primeval slime known as the subconscious, according to the particular dogma professed.. The external fabric of our civilization was woven through conflict out of the savage or fallen Adam, and but for that fabric to Adam or to the savage we should have to return. This cheerful doctrine has of recent years been threatened with its David in the shape of intensive research into the real nature of -primitive man. His modern representatives are still extant in communities scattered about odd corners of the world. This primitive, not to be confused with the savage, who is a-martyr to an elaborate machinery of social organization, is found to be an extraordinary creature indeed. He does not make war, he does not grab or cheat or slay or torment his fellows in the name of their higher interests. The beginnings of the Kingdom of God are within him. Now the nearest allies in the animal world of this disconcerting dawn-man who upsets the professors' apple-carts are the anthropoid apes. What secrets affecting our whole system of thought may they not reveal? As one thinks of those orangs boxed up in their Tottenham Court Road prisons, another questions stirs uneasily in the mind. Are these lost hirsute cousins of ours gentler than us civilized men ? Which then is Caliban ? It wouldn't be a bad idea to spare them, in order to find out.
H. J. MASSINGHAM.
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