Читать книгу From Monkey to Man, or, Society in the Tertiary Age онлайн

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Being thus separated, and so removed from mutual influence, they soon diverged in customs. The Ammi, under more favorable circumstances, began to walk erect, to live more on the ground, to find many uses for their hands, and to make some progress in speech. The Lali, who had wandered into a less hospitable country, made no progress whatever, but rather degenerated; so that when, generations later, the two varieties met again on Cocoanut Hill, there were marked differences between them.

They had both come to the Cocoanut Hill country in a great migration of monkeys from the South, the Ammi coming from the southeast and the Lali from the southwest. This migration was caused by the failure of fruits in the south on account of some cataclysm in Nature of which we have no reliable accounts; and monkeys of every kind came north, so that there were soon all the varieties of which we have spoken in the Cocoanut Hill region. And this failure of fruits, we may add, was a principal cause of the providence of the Monkeys in laying up stores; for they were anxious that a second famine should not occur like that in the land from which they had come.