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from Saturday Evening Post
Charles Darwin
by Ellis Parker ButlerCharles Robert Darwin was the Englishman who sailed around the world in the year 1831 and discovered that men were descended from monkeys.
He was a fair-minded man and did not insist that only his own countrymen were the apes' grandchildren; he let us all in on the ground floor. He was an internationalist in the matter and allowed the poor American hotel clerk to have as much ape in him as the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Mr. Darwin did not claim that our ancestors lost their tails suddenly by sitting on buzz saws, but that they wore them off gradually, here a little, there a little, as they went out of style. That is called The Theory of Evolution and explains why tailors do not have to make tail pockets to hold our tails, as formerly.
Tailors were first called tailors because they had to make pockets for tails.
The Theory of Evolution is that our grandparents once lived in trees and swung from limb to limb by their tails. In those days the giraffe was a sort of cow and had no more neck than an oyster, but it began eating the tops of trees, and thus got a long neck. When the giraffe had eaten all the tops of the trees, the monkeys in that county had no more tree tops to swing by the tail in, and they lost their tails and became human beings named Arthur and Ermintrude. This made the fundamentalists quite angry and they said "Pooh!" every time Charles Darwin was mentioned, and he died April 19, 1882.
Mr. Darwin's last book was The Formation of Vegetable Mold Through the Action of Worms, With Observations on Their Habits, but it never got to be one of the six best sellers. It had a good enough plot, but people said they did not like the heroine.
www.ellisparkerbutler.info
Saturday, October 07 at 2:38:57am USA Central
