4. Mama’s Nice Little Man

Mr. Samuel Butler has made a discerning comment in his Notebooks concerning a similar occasion. He had been standing for an hour in a densely packed crowd, watching a midnight fire in downtown London. The conflagration, which had badly damaged the top story of a business building, had been apparently brought under control, when it suddenly flared up again, giving promise of more and better entertainment. The audience, which had grown restless, now froze to full attention.

Presently Mr. Butler overheard one Cockney saying to another, “That corner stack is alight now quite nicely,” a cheerful observation which inspired the author to add, “People’s sympathies seem generally to be with the fire so long as no one is in danger of being burned.”

Verily, the human race is a queer institution, and we live in the wackiest of all possible worlds.

This generalization of Mr. Butler’s, droll enough to fetch a chuckle, is more soberly truthful than we like to admit. The genus homo, should you be interested in its antics, differs from all other species of animal life mostly by its amazing inconsistencies.

If you, gentle reader, are in no hurry to drive out to the country club where you have an engagement to spend the afternoon knocking a little white ball from here to there to yonder in hope of doing it with fewer swats than were required yesterday, let us tarry for a moment to look into our relation to the other animals.

And let’s have no bumptious protest that you’re not an animal! You’re certainly not a vegetable or a mineral. Of course we differ from all other animals, though not at the points we usually think of first. We converse with one another, but so do horses: we know what day of the month it is, but so do the swallows who annually spend the summer at San Juan Capistrano: we blaze a trail to inform followers what course we have taken, but any dog can do that.

The animals cannot read or write, which is also true of the large majority of the human race, to which may be added a considerable number of humans who can read but don’t. The more highly civilized among us practice monogamy, but so does the beaver who is said to have an even better record for steadfastness.

The main difference between the so-called dumb animals and human beings is in the fact that animals are largely guided by instinct while we, who consider ourselves more fortunate, are out on our own with a free pass to make all the mistakes available to us.

How did we get that way?

Until little more than a half-century ago, the prevailing belief of the Christian World, in regard to humanity’s origin, was documented in the early pages of the Book of Genesis. In a vaguely located Asian garden, the Creator of all life, having finished the structural jobs of making the earth, separating the seas from the land, lighting the sky, bringing forth vegetation, the fish and an assortment of animals, produced a pair of human beings, endowed with a superior intelligence which promptly expressed an insatiable curiosity.