Monkeycide

I do not think I could commit Monkeycide myself. They look, as lady Macbeth says, so like our Fathers.

This consideration, together with our having nobler game in view, prevented us from committing monkeycide, although the temptation was always in sight.

But happily the reflection, ‘What would Professor Huxley say?’ joined with a certain ‘am-I-not-a-man-and-a-brother’ expression about the creature, checked me in time, and saved me from a crime worse than even monkeycide; for here there was no tail that I could have pleaded in excuse.

“MONKEYCIDE.” Harris, an assayer of Gold Hill, Nev., had a pet monkey […] Tenderly Harris nursed his little pet, but he could not save him. Jocko drank a gallon of water, rolled up his queer little eyes, and died. The Gold Hill News, which tells this bright little story, coins the word “monkey[-]cide.”

The only consolatory or redeeming feature in the case, if by any stretch of fancy it can be called such, was founded upon the hypothesis that “burglary”—and not science was the object of the visitors, when “justifiable monkeycide” would be a legitimate verdict, even though according to the requirements of a late Chief Justice, the burglars in this case “had not all the instruments of their avocation visible upon them.”

He was shockingly boy[-]like, but without stopping to decide whether it were a case of homicide, or merely monkeycide, I pressed him with difficulty into the bag and stealthily started for my room, attempting the while to allay my compunctions of conscience by believing my motif to be in the interest of science.

A showman has been traveling through that section, exhibiting a wonderful animal which be called the “missing link,” and claimed it was half monkey and half human. The other day the “missing link” and the show­man had a fracas and the former struck the latter with a club, killing “it” or “him.” The showman was arrested and the grave question now to be legally balanced is whether the accused is guilty of homicide or monkeycide.

Some chroniclers say that he was led through the streets with the dead monkey tied round his neck, and others, and these, I think, the more worthy of credence, affirm that, when he had passed his drills, he was given an extra allowance of “Guards” to expiate his crime of monkeycide.