Chapter Mamillius to Man of Law's Tale of M by Brewer's Readers Handbook

The Arabs maintain that the monkey Nasnâs and the ape Wabár were once human beings.

According to Plato man is “a two-legged animal without feathers.”

…to leave what with his toil he won
To that unfledged and two-legged thing, a son.
   —Dryden: Absalom and Achitophel, i. 171–2 (1681).

Man (Isle of), a corruption of main-au (“little island”); Latinized into Menavia. Cæsar calls it “Mon-a,”the Scotch pronunciation of main-au; and hence comes “Monabia” for Menavia.

Man (Races of). According to the Bible, the whole human race sprang from one individual, Adam. Virey affirms there were two original pairs. Jacquinot and Latham divide the race into three primordial stocks; Kant into four; Blumenbach into five; Buffon into six; Hunter into seven; Agassiz into eight; Pickering into eleven; Bory St. Vincent into fourteen; Desmoulins into sixteen; Morton into twenty-two; Crawfurd into sixty; and Burke into sixty-three.

Man in Black (The), said to be meant for Goldsmith’s father. A true oddity, with the tongue of a Timon and the heart of an uncle Toby. He declaims against beggars, but relieves every one he meets; he ridicules generosity, but would share his last cloak with the needy.—Goldsmith: Citizen of the World (1759).

(Washington Irving has a tale called The Man in Black.)

Man in the Moon (The). Some say it is the man who picked up a bundle of sticks on the sabbath day (Numb. xv. 32–36). Dantê says it is Cain, and that the “bush of thorns” is an emblem of the curse pronounced on the earth, “Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee” (Gen. iii. 18). Some say it is Endymion, taken there by Diana.

N.B.—The curse pronounced on the “man” was this: “As you regarded not ‘Sunday’ on earth, you shall keep a perpetual ‘Moon-day’ in heaven.” This, of course, is a Teutonic tradition.

The bush of thorns, in the Schaumburglippê version, is to indicate that the man strewed thorns in the church path, to hinder people from attending mass on Sundays.

Now doth Cain with fork of thorns confine
On either hemisphere, touching the wave
Beneath the towers of Seville. Yesternight
The moon was round.
   —Dante: Inferno, xx. (1300).

Her gite way gray and full of spottis black,
And on her brest a chorle painted ful even,
Bering a bush of thornis on his back,
Which for his theft might clime so ner the heven.
   —Chaucer.

A North Frisian version gives cabbages instead of a faggot of wood.

(There are other traditions, among which may be mentioned “The Story of the Hare and the Elephant.” In this story “the man in the moon” is a hare.—Pantschatantra, a collection of Sanskrit fables.)

Man in the Moon, a man who visits the “inland parts of Africa.”—W. Thomson: Mammuth or Human Nature Displayed on a Grand Scale (1789).

Man in the Moon, the man who, by the aid of a magical glass, shows Charles Fox (the man of the people) various eminent contemporaries.—W. Thomson: The Man in the Moon or Travels into the Lunar Regions (1783).

(Drayton has a poem called The Man on the Moone, 1605.)

Man of Blood. Charles I. was so called by the puritans, because he made war on his parliament. The allusion is to 2 Sam. xvi. 7.