in the complication and abstruseness of this very moral
chart (one of which I perceive standing on your mantelpiece), you may
learn the confusion which still reigns over the human intellect. Now, in
regarding us, you can understand the very converse of your dilemma. How
much easier, for instance, is it to take a yard-stick, and by a simple
admeasurement of a tail, come to a sound, obvious and incontrovertible
conclusion as to the extent of the intellect of the specimen, than by
the complicated, contradictory, self-balancing and questionable process
to which you are reduced! Were there only this fact, it would abundantly
establish the higher moral condition of the monikinrace, as it is
compared with that of man."

"Dr. Reasono, am I to understand that the monikin family seriously
entertain a position so extravagant as this; that a monkey is a creature
more intellectual and more highly civilized than man?"

"Seriously, good Sir John! Why you are the first respectable person it
has been my fortune to meet, who has even affected to doubt the fact. It
is well known that both belong to the improvable class of animals, and
that monkeys, as you are pleased to term us, were once men, with all
their passions, weaknesses, inconsistencies, mode of philosophy, unsound
ethics, frailties, incongruities and subserviency to matter; that they
passed into the monikin state by degrees, and that large divisions of
them are constantly evaporating into the immaterial world, completely
spiritualized and free from the dross of flesh. I do not mean in what is
called death--for that is no more than an occasional deposit of matter
to be resumed in a new aspect, and with a nearer approach to the grand
results (whether of the improvable or of the retrogressive classes)--but
those final mutations which transfer us to another planet, to enjoy a
higher state of being, and leaving us always on the high road towards
final excellence."

"All this is very ingenious, sir; but before you can persuade me into
the belief that man is an animal inferior to a monkey, Dr. Reasono, you
will allow me to say that you must prove it."

"Ay, ay, or me, either," put in Captain Poke, waspishly.

"Were I to cite my proofs, gentlemen," continued the philosopher, whose
spirit appeared to be much less moved by our doubts than ours were by
his position--"I should in the first place refer you to history. All the
monikin writers are agreed in recording the gradual translati