[FN#387] Modern science which, out of the depths of its self-consciousness, has settled so many disputed questions, speaking by the organs of Messieurs Woodman and Tidy ("Medical Jurisprudence”) has decided that none of the lower animals can bear issue to man.  But the voice of the world is against them and as Voltaire says one cannot be cleverer than everybody.  To begin with there is the will:  the she-quadruman shows a distinct lust for man by fondling him and displaying her parts as if to entice him.  That carnal connection has actually taken place cannot be doubted:  my late friend Mirza Ali Akbar, of Bombay, the famous Munshi to Sir Charles Napier during the conquest of Sind, a man perfectly veracious and trustworthy, assured me that in the Gujarat province he had witnessed a case with his own eyes.  He had gone out “to the jungle,” as the phrase is, with another Moslem who, after keeping him waiting for an unconscionable time, was found carnally united to a she-monkey.  My friend, indignant as a good Moslem should be, reproved him for his bestiality and then asked him how it had come to pass:  the man answered that the she-monkey came regularly to look at him on certain occasions, that he was in the habit of throwing her something to eat and that her gratitude displayed such sexuality that he was tempted and “fell.”  That the male monkey shows an equal desire for the woman is known to every frequenter of the “Zoo.”  I once led a party of English girls to see a collection of mandrill and other anthropoid apes in the Menagerie of a well-known Russian millionaire, near Florence, when the Priapism displayed was such that the girls turned back and fled in fright.  In the mother-lands of these anthropoids (the Gaboon, Malacca etc.) the belief is universal and women have the liveliest fear of them.  In 1853 when the Crimean war was brewing a dog-faced baboon in Cairo broke away from his “Kuraydati” (ape-leader), threw a girl in the street and was about to ravish her when a sentinel drew his bayonet and killer the beast.  The event was looked upon as an evil omen by the older men, who shook their heads and declared that these were bad times when apes attempted to ravish the daughters of Moslems.  But some will say that the grand test, the existence of the mule between man and monkey, though generally believed in, is characteristically absent, absent as the “missing link” which goes so far as to invalidate Darwinism in one and perhaps the most important part of its contention.  Of course the offspring of such union would be destroyed, yet t he fact of our never having found a trace of it except in legend and idle story seems to militate against its existence.  When, however, man shall become “Homo Sapiens” he will cast off the prejudices of the cradle and the nursery and will ascertain by actual experiment if human being and monkey can breed together.  The lowest order of bimana, and the highest order of quadrumana may, under most favourable circumstances, bear issue and the