HALF A MILLION MAN-LIKE APES.

Taranaki Daily News, 8 October 1921, Page 11

HALF A MILLION MAN-LIKE APES.

RACE THAT IS FAST DYING OUT. TAKING A CENSUS OF GORILLAS. xHE LAND WHERE THE MONKEYS LIVE. This is census year with us, a counting of human heads, so that before many months are out we shall know how many tens of millions the war and epidemics and natural decay has left us. We may never get an accurate world census, but it is roughly calculated that the human family on earth to-day has increased, to 1600 millions. So, in spite of everything, mankind as a whole continues to prosper to the extent which that increase indicates.

We were very, very few in number once upon a time. The brain and its powers to overcome natural difficulties are, under Providence, responsible for the rise of the human family. How has it fared with the creatures nearest man—the anthropoid apes? That brilliant scientist, Professor Arthur Keith, in the most recent of a delightful series of lectures at the Royal Institution, has been making a calculated guess at the subject. Nobody can know, but all the information d-n existence is at his disposal, and after working the matter carefully out he comes to the conclusion that man’s poor, benighted relations, the apes, number 480,000 —rather fewer than half a million, or only just exceeding, say, the population of Leeds. MAN CONQUERS DISTANCE. Man conquers distance and climate, -and lives almost wheresoev r he will; but the apes, in spite of their r elatively large brains, have learned, not to master, but to accept only one sort of conditions.. The conditions natural to them are the jungle lands of the equatorial zone of the Old World. Less then one-fif-teenth part of the earth's surface is available to them. In their streaming twilight world, gorillas have advanced physically upon lines marvellously close to human. Their gait in the trees is as ours upon the land. They are as tall as our tallest man. They weigh 17-stone and more. Yet their brains, positively man-like in form and substance, are insufficient for mastery of circumstances, and to-day there are but 30,000 gorillas in tile world. GORILLA REMAINS IN THE TREES. The orangs, next in point of size and extraordinarily teachable if one dare but handle them, number 50,000; the clever and less fierce chimpanzees total 200,000; and those strange, primitive creatures, the gibbons—they are amazingly like little, shuffling, old men as they run bolt upright —are also credited with a 200,000 figure. And that is the lot, 480,000 in all; 480,000 man-like apes gathered in one restricted area of the World in one special type of climate. Man is not a specialised ape; the mightiest -gorilla is not a lowly, bestial type of savage man; but in the far-dis-tant twilight ages of creation there was a living stock from which two streams of life progressed. —one with soul and brain and conscience attained humanity, 1600 millions strong to-day; the other changed from a crawling to, an upright pose, but took to the trees and remained there, brutes, the man-like apes of today, 480,000 in number, and doomed to extinction from the book of life as certainly as the last of the passenger pigeons, which died six years ago.