The claim of Professor Grotius Jan Beek to have discovered, or
learned, the language of the greater apes has been demonstrated
clearly enough. He is not the original discoverer of the fact that
they have what may be said to correspond with a language; nor is he
the first man to have lived for some while in the jungle protected by
wooden bars, with a view to acquiring some knowledge of the meaning of
the various syllables that gorillas appear to utter. If so crude a
collection of sounds, amounting to less than a hundred words, if words
they are, may be called a language, it may be admitted that the
Professor has learned it, as his recent experiments show. What he has
not proved is his assertion that he has actually conversed with a
gorilla, or by signs, or grunts, or any means whatever obtained an
insight, as he put it, into its mentality, or, as we should put it,
its point of view. This Professor Beek claims to have done; and though
he gives us a certain plausible corroboration of a kind which makes
his story appear likely, it should be borne in mind that it is not of
the nature of proof.
The Professor’s story is briefly that having acquired this language,
which nobody that has witnessed his experiments will call in question,
he went back to the jungle for a week, living all the time in the
ordinary explorer’s cage of the Blik pattern. Towards the very end of
the week a big male gorilla came by, and the Professor attracted it by
the one word “Food.” It came, he says, close to the cage, and seemed
prepared to talk but became very angry on seeing a man there, and beat
the cage and would say nothing. The Professor says that he asked it
why it was angry. He admits that he had learned no more than forty
words of this language, but believes that there are perhaps thirty
more. Much however is expressed, as he says, by mere intonation.
Anger, for instance; and scores of allied words, such as terrible,
frightful, kill, whether noun, verb or adjective, are expressed, he
says, by a mere growl. Nor is there any word for “Why,” but queries
are signified by the inflexion of the voice.
When he asked it why it was angry the gorilla said that men killed
him, and added a noise that the professor said was evidently meant to
allude to guns. The only word used, he says, in this remark of the
gorilla’s was the word that signified “man.” The sentence as
understood by the professor amounted to “Man kill me. Guns.” But the
word “kill” was represented simply by a snarl, “me” by slapping
its chest, and “guns” as I have explained was only represented by a
noise. The Professor believes that ultimately a word for guns may be
evolved out of that noise, but thinks that it will take many
centuries, and that if during that time guns should cease to be in
use, this stimulus being withdrawn, the word will never be evolved at
all, nor of course will it be needed.
The Professor tried, by evincing interest, ignorance, and incredulity,
and even indignation, to encourage the gorilla to say more; but to his
disappointment, all the more intense after having exchanged that one
word of conversation with one of the beasts, the gorilla only repeated
what it had said, and beat on the cage again. For half an hour this
went on, the Professor showing every sign of sympathy, the gorilla
raging and beating upon the cage.
It was half an hour of the most intense excitement to the Professor,
during which time he saw the realization of dreams that many
considered crazy, glittering as it were within his grasp, and all the
while this ridiculous gorilla would do nothing but repeat the mere
shred of a sentence and beat the cage with its great hands; and the
heat of course was intense. And by the end of the half hour the
excitement and the heat seem to have got the better of the Professor’s
temper, and he waved the disgusting brute angrily away with a gesture
that probably was not much less impatient than the gorilla’s own. And
at that the animal suddenly became voluble. He beat more furiously
than ever upon the cage and slipped his great fingers through the
bars, trying to reach the Professor, and poured out volumes of
ape-chatter.
Why, why did men shoot at him, he asked. He made himself terrible,
therefore men ought to love him. That was the whole burden of what the
Professor calls its argument. “Me, me terrible,” two slaps on the
chest and then a growl. “Man love me.” And then the emphatic
negative word, and the sound that meant guns, and sudden furious
rushes at the cage to try to get at the Professor.
The gorilla, Professor Beek explains, evidently admired only strength;
whenever he said “I make myself terrible to Man,” a sentence he
often repeated, he drew himself up and thrust out his huge chest and
bared his frightful teeth; and certainly, the Professor says, there
was something terribly grand about the menacing brute. “Me
terrible,” he repeated again and again, “Me terrible. Sky, sun,
stars with me. Man love me. Man love me. No?” It meant that all the
great forces of nature assisted him and his terrible teeth, which he
gnashed repeatedly, and that therefore man should love him, and he
opened his great jaws wide as he said this, showing all the brutal
force of them.
There was to my mind a genuine ring in Professor Beek’s story, because
he was obviously so much more concerned, and really troubled, by the
dreadful depravity of this animal’s point of view, or mentality as he
called it, than he was concerned with whether or not we believed what
he had said.
And I mentioned that there was a circumstance in his story of a
plausible and even corroborative nature. It is this. Professor Beek,
who noticed at the time a bullet wound in the tip of the gorilla’s
left ear, by means of which it was luckily identified, put his
analysis of its mentality in writing and showed it to several others,
before he had any way of accounting for the beast having such a mind.
Long afterwards it was definitely ascertained that this animal had
been caught when young on the slopes of Kilimanjaro and trained and
even educated, so far as such things are possible, by an eminent
German Professor, a persona grata at the Court of Berlin.