I read in a Paris paper an interesting account of a reception
that some of our distinguished friends passing the season in
Newport gave to a chimpanzee. Of course, it was mortifying to an
American to have it known by Europeans that my compatriots were
prepared to confess in that practical way to their belief in the
evolution theory, and to have it understood in the cultivated
centers of English and Continental life that over here people
of advertised refinement could drop into such close relations
of social reciprocity without either the Newport gentlemen and
ladies or the chimpanzee feeling themselves insulted by the
contact. But that first feeling, which of course was one of
loathing, not for the chimpanzee, but for his companions, soon
gave place to one which I am sure was more just and wholesome,
this, namely, a pathetic realization of the horrid sense of
emptiness which people must be suffering under to be willing to
fill up the vacuum with material of such an abominably unhuman
type; like a man so agonizingly hungry that he had rather
fill himself with carrion than go to bed supperless, and not
only that, but reduced to such an extreme point of inanition
as even to acquire an appetite for carrion.--CHARLES H.
PARKHURST.
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