![](\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/ThatTroublesOurMonkeyAgain.jpeg\" "\\"Click")
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I learned more about this image's content and context from a bit of online search. Thus Janet Browne (\"Darwin in caricature: A study in the popularisation and dissemination of evolution<\/a>\", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society<\/em>, 2001) explains that<\/p>\n Darwin's general hairiness could easily be turned into the animal fur of anthropoid apes. Add a tail, and there was an image immediately conveying the idea of human evolution. The Hornet displayed Darwin as a \"Venerable Orang-Outang: A contribution to Unnatural History\" in March 1871. The Dalziel brothers, the most eminent team of British wood-engravers of the period, produced the same set of symbolic devices in \"That Troubles our Monkey again\" for Fun in 1872. The Dalzeils add a well-bred young woman to accentuate what was to them the shocking idea of apish relatives in the family tree. These pictures of Darwin-as-ape or Darwin-as-monkey readily identified him as the author of the theory, in much the same way as a tricorne hat signalled Napoleon.<\/span><\/p>\n And Alexandra Witze (\"Q&A: How cartoonists skewer tensions between science and society<\/a>\", Nature<\/em> 2\/1\/2021) points out a connection between the woman's skirts and marine ascidians<\/a>, which I totally missed:<\/p>\n Another of my favourites is an 1872 cartoon of Charles Darwin as a monkey squatting suggestively close to a woman whose billowing skirts resemble a sea squirt. Victorians found this one funny without needing any explanation. In his latest book, Darwin had dared to compare human with animal emotions \u2014 and he also relied on his argument that women\u2019s evolutionary history made them more proficient in the kitchen than in the study. That the caption includes the technical name for sea squirt, \u2018ascidian\u2019, testifies to the enormous contemporary enthusiasm for exploring marine life and rocks along the coast.<\/span><\/p>\n (In fact, I carelessly misread the caption as referring to some then-well-known woman named something like Ma?ine A?idian…)<\/p>\n One remaining question for me is how to parse (and interpret) the cartoon's caption, \"That troubles our monkey again.\" Is that<\/em> the demonstrative or the complementizer? And in either case, what's the reference of the subject of troubles<\/em>, and when did it trouble our monkey before?<\/p>\n Witze's article leads off with this great visual parody of vaccine skepticism as of 1802:<\/p>\n As Wikipedia explains,<\/p>\n Produced after\u00a0Edward Jenner<\/a>\u00a0administered the first vaccine, Gillray\u2019s work caricatured the fear patients had being\u00a0vaccinated<\/a>\u00a0from\u00a0smallpox<\/a>\u00a0via\u00a0cowpox<\/a>\u00a0that it would make them sprout cowlike appendages.<\/span><\/p>\n Plus \u00e7a change…<\/em><\/p>\n Some past LLOG posts vaguely related to Darwin, emotion, and speech:<\/p>\n \"Darwin and Deacon on love and language<\/a>\", 2\/14\/2004 I thought I once posted about Darwin's attempts to find small-integer musical intervals in animal vocalizations, but apparently I planned such a post and never got around to it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I've been going through old boxes of paper, looking for (the very small fraction of) stuff that I want to keep, and recycling the rest. I'm uncovering many interesting memories, as well as a few things that I have no recollection of at all. Representing the latter category is a faded xerox of the cartoon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linguistics-in-the-funny-papers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51386"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51398,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51386\/revisions\/51398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n
\n\"Aw+<\/a>\", 4\/29\/2004
\n\"Poem in the key of what<\/a>\", 10\/9\/2006
\n\"Political correctness, biology and culture<\/a>\", 10\/31\/2006
\n\"The cabinet of Dr. Birdwhistell<\/a>\", 11\/2\/2006
\n\"Musical protolanguage: Darwin's theory of language evolution revisited<\/a>\", 2\/12\/2009
\n\"An inquiry concerning the principles of morals<\/a>\", 4\/7\/2009<\/p>\n