Bearing these prominent facts of man's common consciousness steadily in mind, it will be easier to consider what was the condition of the first man in respect to the use of his senses, and his power of inferring the reason and meaning of things from their qualities and connections, as well as his capacity to worship his Maker with thoughts such as David uttered in the eighth Psalm, or such as Milton imagined appropriate to the lips of the first man These are Thy glorious works, Parent of good, Thus wondrous fair; Thyself how wondrous then! 165 CHAPTER XIV. THE FIRST MAN NOT BORN A BABY-BABOON NOR MADE A SAVAGE. 1. THE first human being could not have been brought into this world as a babe—a wailing, helpless, naked, living mass of wants—without an instinct or a capacity to appropriate the means of maintaining life for an hour. Man could not have been created thus feeble and dependent-unless, indeed, a nurse qualified for the occasion had also been created to take care of him. Then what was she? It need not be shown that an infant left alone in any conceivable paradise or place of comfort and convenience, would have been but a most marvellous failure, and the strangest of all possible foundlings-a babe created to perish if not finding a nurse nowhere to be found. No creature demands so much tending as a new-born man-except, perhaps, a kangaroo, carried in a maternal pocket till it has imbibed life enough to shift for itself. What suitable nurse is there in this world for a human babe but a human mother? Certain mythical personages have been mythically nursed: Romulus and Remus by a wolf-but wolves in general are more inclined to devour babies than to dandle them. Though cats have suckled young rabbits, we have no authentic instance of a bereaved ape suckling a human baby. But suppose, according to the new hypothesis, some amiable feminine ape, as next akin to the Adam, or at least the Ish, variety of vetebrate development, undertook the place of foster-mother to the new-made motherless foundling in human shape. Could not she have done all that was necessary? That is an experiment not yet tried by the Zoological Society. We wonder why not, seeing so many babies in these experimental, philanthropic, Christian times are born of mothers that evince less motherly affection than any of the brutes. Have not apes been found ready to adopt babies? If not, why not? We are out in our science and philosophy. The Darwino-Huxleyan hypothesis requires not the nurse only, but the veritable mother of the first man, to have been a paulo-post baboon of the missing-link variety- neither man nor ape. Well, say there was a baboon, once upon a time, who (? that) became so very refined and superior to her ancestors, that by dint of natural taste and nice selection of companionship she brought forth a something tending to become a man-child. Perhaps the force of imagination may have had something to do with such a supposed result; and we know, humanly speaking, imagination is very strong in the production of hypothetical oddities. But even imagination must have had some reality, some received image, to work with; and really we see not how a baboon could have conceived a man, even in idea, since we have no evidence that even a lady baboon has any imagination at all. But did the wish become the father of the thought, and the thought become the father of the new pithecoid humanish progeny? Even this cannot be admitted till we know all the possible force of a wish or a thought in any kind of ape, since no apes known to us have any wishes or thoughts to speak of, being content to continue only apish-they know not why and care not wherefore. But say that some such simian of the gentler sex, whether sentimental or otherwise, did find herself in the interesting condition supposed, can we also suppose any conceivable baboon, any possible link between primate No. 1 and far-off primate No. 2, endowed all at once with instincts exactly adapting her to bring up her unaccountable baby in a becoming manner? It must have required especial, consistent, and patient teaching and training to establish the young gentleman in the habit of walking uprightly, where the influence of example was of necessity entirely wanting or acting all the wrong way. Being born with a real foot, which, for an ape, would be a lusus naturæ, such a mother would be more likely to insist on his going on his toes and his knuckles; but how he could have followed her into trees when he began to feed himself is a mystery. He had a foot to stand on, but therefore very unfit for clutching, climbing, and jumping from branch to branch. She must have been more uncomfortable with such a son than a hen with one chick, and that a duckling. Or if we imagine the bantling as to the foot only in a state of transition with the hand modification still betraying his descent from his quadrumanal parents, to walk erect as the monarch of all he surveyed was a startling achievement. But like St. Denis, who, in the legend, walked so well without his head, the first step would be the chief difficulty in the way of progress. We happen to be utterly unable to indicate any probable period in the long æons of this world's geologic record when the ape became a person—that is to say, conscious of himself as having become a man. But we may conclude that by the extermination of the lowest types of humanity, the gulf between man and the ape has been widened. When the separation between man and ape became sufficiently distinct to prevent interbreeding cannot be ascertained.'* We should think not; but by all means let anthropologists who expect to ascertain this interesting turning-point in their own genealogy continue their researches. Surely men so intent upon truth will at length be satisfied, if they can but find facts enough, and know how to read them. We must dispose of especial instincts, which imply especial organisation, before we can dispose of specific kinds. None of the instincts of lower animals, monkeys included, will meet the wants of man. His instincts themselves are human and subservient to reason, not * Quoted in the Anthropological Review, July 1865, p. 222, from Isis der Mensch und die Welt, by Raderhausen, Homburg, 1863. This work consists of 2,250 pages. |