“I am informing you,” he said, “of these facts concerning my inquiries in the realm of teratology and the subjoined province of animism because I know that my life-work upon this subject can never now be completed.  It having been necessary for me to destroy my papers and those specimens which, at hideous cost, I had accumulated during twenty years of travel through some of the most barbaric as well as the most civilized parts of the world, this present brief verbal account of the most important inquiry of all shall alone survive me.  You are privileged.  Therefore listen: 

“Two important facts contributed to my choice of a special study:  the social ostracism which very early in my professional career I found to be my lot; and the fact that in myself I afforded a living example of the hybrid.  It has been said and not untruly that the Eurasian hates his father and scorns his mother.  Certainly, this unnatural passion is reciprocated by the parent stock; for the Eurasian is barely acknowledged by his dark brethren and hardly tolerated by the white.

“In spite of my qualifications—­I am a Doctor of Medicine, a Master of Arts, and hold other degrees of Leipzig, the Sorbonne, and elsewhere—­I recognized very early in my career that ordinary practice was impossible for me.  I therefore turned my attention to the special study of embryology, as I fortunately possessed sufficient private means to enable me—­by careful living—­to dispense with the usual proceeds of my profession.

“In short, I hoped to triumph over my hereditary handicap and to build for myself a reputation which should rise above the petty disabilities of caste and place my name upon a level with those of Haeckel, Weismann, Wallace, Focke and the other great students who have helped to advance our knowledge of the science of evolution.

“I early turned my attention to the traditions associated with the Cynocephalus hamadryas, or Sacred Baboon of Abyssinia.  I took up my quarters on the banks of the Hawash and succeeded in ingratiating myself with the Amharun.  The result of my sojourn amongst these strange people is embodied in my work ‘The Ape-Men of Shoa.’

“This work is unpublished and may never see the light, but briefly I may state that the Amharun are a Semitic tribe allied to the Falashas and have been settled for many generations in this southern province of Abyssinia.  Claiming descent from Menelek, son of Suleiman and the Queen of Sheba, they have always been regarded as unclean pariahs.  In part this is due to their bestial custom of eating meat cut from living animals, but it is more particularly attributable to the periodical appearance among them of these cynocephalytes, or man-apes, which form the subject of my work.

“My close inquiries into the physiological history of these monstrosities were only conducted with the utmost difficulty.  In the first place I found that it was customary among the Amharun to slay the creatures at birth, but in those rare cases of survival the cynocephalytes were banished from the community and were compelled to lead a wild life, subsisting as best they might in the foothills of the desolate mountain region.