The Universal KinshipMoore, J. Howard (John Howard)
Philosophy
The Universal Kinship
Moore, J. Howard (John Howard)
Evolution; Human beings; Sociology
_The New York Herald_, in its issue of July 2, 1901, contained an
account of the death of Charlemagne, a chimpanzee who died a short
time before at Grenoble, France. This anthropoid at the time of his
death was the most popular inhabitant of the town. His popularity
was due to his good-nature and intelligence, and especially to the
fact that a few years before his death he had saved a child from
drowning in a well. The ape saw the child fall, and without a
moment’s hesitation climbed down the rope used for the buckets,
seized the child, and climbed out again by the same rope by which he
had descended. The people of the town thought so much of him that
they followed his remains to the grave, and the municipal council
voted to erect a bronze statue to his memory.
A heartless hunter—maybe one of those assassins who fill the wilds
with widows and orphans in the name of Science—tells of the murder
of a mother chimpanzee and her baby in Africa. The mother was high
up in a tree with her little one in her arms. She watched intently,
and with signs of the greatest anxiety, the hunter as he moved about
beneath, and when he took aim at her the poor doomed thing motioned
to him with her hand precisely in the manner of a human being, to
have him desist and go away.
According to Emin Pasha, who was for a number of years Governor of
an Egyptian province on the Upper Nile, and whom Stanley made his
last expedition to ‘rescue,’ chimpanzees sometimes make use of
fire. He told Stanley that, when a tribe of chimpanzees who resided
in a forest near his camp came at night to get fruit from the
orchards, they always came bearing torches to light them on their
way. ‘If I had not seen it with my own eyes,’ he declares, ‘I
never could have believed that these beings have the power of making
fire’.[5] This same authority relates that on one occasion a band
of chimpanzees descended upon his camp and carried off a drum. The
marauders went away in great glee, beating the drum as they
retreated. He says he heard them several times after that, at night,
beating their drum, in the forest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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