Apes

Apes occupy two sharply different roles in the book: they are the subjects of a modern biologist’s experiments and, in the mythology of a later age, the bearers through whom human beings supposedly came into existence. Neither account gives them an independent voice; instead, each makes them central to a human effort to define the species’ origins or limits.

Scientific Study

At a gathering of scientists, the West African president of the Society is described as a biologist famous for interbreeding human beings and Apes. The account gives no method, results, or further explanation of his work. Its brevity leaves the practice as a striking detail of the period’s scientific culture, rather than presenting it as a developed research program.

Role in a Later Origin Myth

During the First Dark Age, a widespread folk belief held that evolution had ceased after Apes appeared. In this account, divine spirits later came down and possessed female Apes, generating human beings. The story recasts humanity’s emergence not as a continuation of animal evolution but as a divine intervention through animal bodies; it is presented as a belief preserved in distorted folklore, not as the book’s account of biological fact.

Human Uses of the Ape Figure

The two portrayals place Apes on either side of a boundary drawn around humanity. The biologist’s experiments make them objects of scientific intervention, while the origin myth makes female Apes the means of a sacred beginning. In both, their significance is defined through what humans do to them or imagine happening through them. The myth’s later generations preserve this human-centered explanation even as scientific knowledge is lost and the past becomes legend.