The Fourth Personal Sojourn of Beelzebub on the Planet Earth

“In any case you must know and bear in mind that for many centuries just this question among similar ephemeral questions has provided material for the kind of mentation which is considered among your favorites as the ‘highest manifestation of Reason.’

“These favorites of yours would in my opinion get quite a correct answer to this question which always excites them, that is, the question how the apes arose, if they were able in the given case to apply one of these sayings again of our dear Mullah Nassr Eddin, who on many occasions used to say: ‘The cause of every misunderstanding must be sought only in woman.’

“If they had attempted the solution of this enigmatic question with that wisdom of his, then perhaps they would have finally discovered whence and how these countrymen of theirs had originated.

“As this question of the genealogy of these apes there is indeed exceedingly abstruse and unusual, I shall inform your Reason about this also as far as possible from every aspect.

“In fact, neither have they descended from apes nor have apes descended from them, but . . . the cause of the origin of these apes is in this case, just as in every other misunderstanding there, also—their women.

“I must tell you first of all that the species of terrestrial ape-beings now arising there under several different exterior forms, never existed at all before the second ‘Transapalnian perturbation’; only afterwards did the genealogy of their species begin.

“The causes of the arising of this ‘misconceived’ being as well as the cause of all the other events more or less serious in an objective sense, which occur on the surface of that ill-fated planet, ensue from two sources, totally independent of each other.

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