milar to those which my gardener retails to me. Favier, an
old soldier, has never opened a book, for the best of reasons. He barely
knows how to cipher: arithmetic rather than reading is forced upon us by
the brutalities of life. Having followed the flag over three-quarters of
the globe, he has an open mind and a memory crammed with reminiscences,
which does not prevent him, when we chat about animals, from making the
most crazy assertions. For him the Bat is a Rat that has grown wings;
the Cuckoo is a Sparrow-hawk retired from business; the Slug is a Snail
who has lost his shell with the advance of years; the Nightjar (Known
also as the Goatsucker, because of the mistaken belief that
the bird sucks the milk of Goats, and, in America, as the
Whippoorwill.--Translator's Note.), the Chaoucho-grapaou, as he calls
her, is an elderly Toad, who, becoming enamoured of milk-food, has grown
feathers, so that she may enter the byres and milk the Goats. It is
impossible to drive these fantastic ideas out of his head. Favier
himself, as will be seen, is an evolutionist after his own fashion,
an evolutionist of a very daring type. In accounting for the origin of
animals nothing gives him pause. He has a reply to everything: "this"
comes from "that." If you ask him why, he answers:

"Look at the resemblance!"

Shall we reproach him with these insanities, when we hear another,
misled by the Monkey's build, acclaim the Pithecanthropus as man's
precursor? Shall we reject the metamorphosis of the Chaoucho-grapaou,
when people tell us in all seriousness that, in the present stage of
scientific knowledge, it is absolutely proved that man is descended from
some rough-hewn Ape? Of the two transformations, Favier's strikes me as
the more credible. A painter of my acquaintance, a brother of the great
composer Felicien David (Felicien Cesar David (1810-1876). His chief
work was the choral symphony "Le Desert":--Translator's Note.), favoured
me one day with his reflections on the human structure:

"Ve, moun bel ami," he said. "Ve, l'home a lou dintre d'un por et lou
defero d'uno mounino." "See, my dear friend, see: man has the inside of
a pig and the outside of a monkey."

I recommend the painter's aphorism to those who might like to discover
man's origin in the Hog when the Ape has gone out of fashion. According
to David, descent is proved by internal resemblances:

"L'home a lou dintre d'un por."

The inventory of precursory types sees n