AUTHOR’S NOTE: The complete “Missing Link” is double the length of these excerpted sections—long enough, I hope, to carry its numerous interrelated subjects and themes: feral children, evolution, gorillas, and language, among others. A broader, more abstract theme—the conflict between myth and science, faith and fact, and the ways people devise to cope with this conflict—is the framework over which these narrower matters have been arranged and connected. Omitted from the present version of the poem are a page each on Mowgli and Sasquatch and an opening section summarizing the plot of Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, wherein several central themes are established and Tarzan’s linguistic and sexual experience among the apes (and later) are emphasized. Passages providing detailed background information have also been dropped, including those on the sign-language experiments with great apes (Washoe was the first “talking” chimp, “Gimme sweet” her first sentence), on real and imaginary sexual interaction between humans and real or imaginary apes, on pre-Sapient human evolution according to Richard Leakey, and on the attitudes of primitive peoples toward the apes who share their environment. Roping the whole structure together is a persona: one child, ages eight through eighteen, brought up by Conservative Baptists with rigidly limited views on the source and nature of humankind. Although links between themes are plainer in the complete poem, the most essential passages have been retained; however, a very abrupt transition probably indicates a dropped section. (Note: Alice Clayton, Lady Graystoke, is Tarzan’s mother; marooned in Africa with her husband, John, she gives birth, goes mad, and dies when the baby is a year old.)
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