the handles of their now useless digging picks, these grew and became tails, hair made its appearance on their bodies, their foreheads became overhanging, and so they became baboons, who are still called 'Tusi's men.'[1] Mr. Kingsley's story of the great and famous nation of the Doasyoulikes, who degenerated by natural selection into gorillas, is the civilized counterpart of this savage myth. Or monkeys may be transformed aborigines, as the Mbocobis relate in South America: in the great conflagration of their forests a man and woman climbed a tree for refuge from the fiery deluge, but the flames singed their faces and they became apes.[2] Among more civilized nations these fancies have graphic representatives in Moslem legends, of which one is as follows: — There was a Jewish city which stood by a river full of fish, but the cunning creatures, noticing the habits of the citizens, ventured freely in sight on the Sabbath, though they carefully kept away on working-days. At last the temptation was too strong for the Jewish fishermen, but they paid dearly for a few days' fine sport by being miraculously turned into apes as a punishment for Sabbath-breaking. In after times, when Solomon passed through the Valley of Apes, between Jerusalem and Mareb, he received from their descendants, monkeys living in houses and dressed like men, an account of their strange history.[3] So, in classic times, Jove had chastised the treacherous race of the Cercopes; he took from them the use of tongues born but to perjure, leaving them to bewail in hoarse cries their fate, transformed into the hairy apes of the Pithecusæ, like and yet unlike the men they had been: —
'In deforme viros animal mutavit, ut idem Dissimiles homini possent similesque videri.'[4]
1 Dos Santos, 'Ethiopia Oriental,' Evora, 1609, part i. chap. ix.; Callaway, 'Zulu Tales,' vol. i. p. 177. See also Burton, 'Footsteps in E. Afr.' p. 274; Waitz, 'Anthropologie,' vol. ii. p. 178 (W. Afr.).
2 D'Orbigny, 'L'Homme Américain,' vol. ii. p. 102.
3 Weil, 'Bibl. Leg. der Muselmänner,' p. 267; Lane, 'Thousand and One N.' vol. iii. p. 350; Burton, 'El Medinah, &c.' vol. ii. p. 343.
4 Ovid, 'Metamm.' xiv. 89-100; Welcker, 'Griechische Götterlehre,' vol. iii. p. 108.
