* * * * *

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS

* * * * *

MEN AND MONKEYS.

Monkeys are certainly, there is no denying it, very like men; and, what is worse, men are still more like monkeys.  Many worthy people, who have a high respect for what they choose to call the Dignity of Human Nature, are much distressed by this similitude, approaching in many cases to absolute identity; and some of them have written books of considerable erudition and ingenuity, to prove that a man is not a monkey; nay, not so much as even an ape; but truth compels us to confess, that their speculations have been far from carrying conviction to our minds.  All such inquirers, from Aristotle to Smellie, principally insist on two great leading distinctions—­speech and reason.  But it is obvious to the meanest capacity, that monkeys have both speech and reason.  They have a language of their own, which, though not so capacious as the Greek, is much more so than the Hottentottish; and as for reason, no man of a truly philosophical genius ever saw a monkey crack a nut, without perceiving that the creature possesses that endowment, or faculty, in no small perfection.  Their speech, indeed, is said not to be articulate; but it is audibly more so than the Gaelic.  The words unquestionably do run into each other, in a way that, to our ears, renders it rather unintelligible; but it is contrary to all the rules of sound philosophizing, to confuse the obtuseness of our own senses with the want of any faculty in others; and they have just as good a right to maintain, and to complain of, our inarticulate mode of speaking, as we have of theirs—­indeed much more—­for monkeys speak the same, or nearly the same, language all over the habitable globe, whereas men, ever since the Tower of Babel, have kept chattering, muttering, humming, and hawing, in divers ways and sundry manners, so that one nation is unable to comprehend what another would be at, and the earth groans in vain with vocabularies and dictionaries.  That monkeys and men are one and the same animal, we shall not take upon ourselves absolutely to assert, for the truth is, we, for one or two, know nothing whatever about the matter; all we mean to say is, that nobody has yet proved that they are not, and farther, that whatever may be the case with men, monkeys have reason and speech.

The monkey has not had justice done him, we repeat and insist upon it; for what right have you to judge of a whole people, from a few isolated individuals,—­and from a few isolated individuals, too, running up poles with a chain round their waist, twenty times the length of their own tail, or grinning in ones or twos through the bars of a cage in a menagerie?  His eyes are red with perpetual weeping—­and his smile is sardonic in captivity.  His fur is mouldy and mangy, and he is manifestly ashamed of his tail, prehensile