Winnowed Wisdom

Book excerpt: Winnowed Wisdom is a satirical work by Stephen Leacock. Leacock was a Canadian teacher, political scientist, writer, and humorist. Excerpt: "We are all descended from monkeys. This descent, however, took place a long time ago and there is no shame in it now. It happened two or three thousand years ago and must have been after and not before the Trojan war. We have to remember also that there are several kinds of monkeys. There is the ordinary monkey seen in the street with the hand organ (communis monacus), the baboon, the giboon (not Edward,) the bright, merry, little chimpanzee, and the hairy ourang-outang with the long arms. Ours is probably the hairy ourang-outang. But the monkey business is only part of it. At an earlier stage men were not even that. They probably began as worms. From that they worked up to being oysters; after that they were fish, then snakes, then birds, then flying squirrels, and at last monkeys."