Man's Place in Nature, and Other Essays. Thomas Henry Huxley
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time uttering his characteristic yell, designed, it would seem, to terrify his antagonist. Instantly, unless he is disabled by a well-directed shot, he makes an onset, and, striking his antagonist with the palm of his hands, or seizing him with a grasp from which there is no escape, he dashes him upon the ground, and lacerates him with his tusks.
“He is said to seize a musket, and instantly crush the barrel between his teeth. … This animal’s savage nature is very well shewn by the implacable desperation of a young one that was brought here. It was taken very young, and kept four months, and many means were used to tame it; but it was incorrigible, so that it bit me an hour before it died.”
Mr. Ford discredits the house-building and elephant-driving stories, and says that no well-informed natives believe them. They are tales told to children.
I might quote other testimony to a similar effect, but, as it appears to me, less carefully weighed and sifted, from the letters of MM. Franquet and Gautier Laboullay, appended to the memoir of M. I. G. St. Hilaire, which I have already cited.
Bearing in mind what is known regarding the Orang and the Gibbon, the statements of Dr. Savage and Mr. Ford do not appear to me to be justly open to criticism on à priori grounds. The Gibbons, as we have seen, readily assume the erect posture, but the Gorilla is far better fitted by its organization for that attitude than are the Gibbons: if the laryngeal pouches of the Gibbons, as is very likely, are important in giving volume to a voice which can be heard for half a league, the Gorilla, which has similar sacs, more largely developed, and whose bulk is fivefold that of a Gibbon, may well be audible for twice that distance. If the Orang fights with its hands, the Gibbons and Chimpanzees with their teeth, the Gorilla may, probably enough, do either or both; nor is there anything to be said against either Chimpanzee or Gorilla building a nest, when it is proved that the Orang-Utan habitually performs that feat.
With all this evidence, now ten to fifteen years old, before the world, it is not a little surprising that the assertions of a recent traveller, who, so far as the Gorilla is concerned, really does very little more than repeat, on his own authority, the statements of Savage and of Ford, should have met with so much and such bitter opposition. If subtraction be made of what was known before, the sum and substance of what M. Du Chaillu has affirmed as a matter of his own observation respecting the Gorilla, is, that, in advancing to the attack, the great brute beats his chest with his fists. I confess I see nothing very improbable, or very much worth disputing about, in this statement.
With respect to the other man-like Apes of Africa, M. Du Chaillu tells us absolutely nothing, of his own knowledge, regarding the common Chimpanzee; but he informs us of a bald-headed species or variety, the nschiego mbouve, which builds itself a shelter, and of another rare kind with a comparatively small face, large facial angle, and peculiar note, resembling “Kooloo.”
As the Orang shelters itself with a rough coverlet of leaves, and the common Chimpanzee, according to that eminently trustworthy observer Dr. Savage, makes a sound like “Whoo-whoo,”—the grounds of the summary repudiation with which M. Du Chaillu’s statements on these matters have been met is not obvious.
If I have abstained from quoting M. Du Chaillu’s work, then, it is not because I discern any inherent improbability in his assertions respecting the man-like Apes; nor from any wish to throw suspicion on his veracity; but because, in my opinion, so long as his narrative remains in its present state of unexplained and apparently inexplicable confusion, it has no claim to original authority respecting any subject whatsoever.
It may be truth, but it is not evidence.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Regnum Congo: hoc est Vera Descriptio Regni Africani quod tam ab incolis quam Lusitanis Congus Appellatur, per Philippum Pigafettam, olim ex Edoardo Lopez acroamatis lingua Italica excerpta, num Latio sermone donata ab August. Cassiod. Reinio. Iconibus et imaginibus rerum memorabilium quasi vivis, opera et industria Joan. Theodori et Joan. Israelis de Bry, fratrum exornata. Francofurti, MDXCVIII.
[2] “Except this that their legges had no calves.”—[Ed. 1626.] And in a marginal note, “These great apes are called Pongo’s.”
[3] Purchas’ note.—Cape Negro is in 16 degrees south of the line.
[4] Purchas’ marginal note, p. 982:—“The Pongo a giant ape. He told me in conference with him, that one of these Pongoes tooke a negro boy of his which lived a moneth with them. For they hurt not those which they surprise at unawares, except they look on them; which he avoyded. He said their highth was like a man’s, but their bignesse twice as great. I saw the negro boy. What the other monster should be he hath forgotten to relate; and these papers came to my hand since his death, which, otherwise, in my often conferences, I might have learned. Perhaps he meaneth the Pigmy Pongo killers mentioned.”
[5] Archives du Museum, tome x.
[6] I am indebted to Dr. Wright, of Cheltenham, whose paleontological labours are so well known, for bringing this interesting relic to my knowledge. Tyson’s granddaughter, it appears, married Dr. Allardyce, a physician of repute in Cheltenham, and brought, as part of her dowry, the skeleton of the “Pygmie.” Dr. Allardyce presented it to the Cheltenham Museum, and, through the good offices of my friend Dr. Wright, the authorities of the Museum have permitted me to borrow, what is, perhaps, its most remarkable ornament.
[7] “Mandrill” seems to signify a “man-like ape,” the word “Drill” or “Dril” having been anciently employed in England to denote an Ape or Baboon. Thus in the fifth edition of Blount’s “Glossographia, or a Dictionary interpreting the hard words of whatsoever language now used in our refined English tongue … very useful for all such as desire to understand what they read,” published in 1681, I find, “Dril—a stone-cutter’s tool wherewith he bores little holes in marble, &c. Also a large overgrown Ape and Baboon, so called.” “Drill” is used in the same sense in Charleton’s “Onomasticon Zoicon,” 1668. The singular etymology of the word given by Buffon seems hardly a probable one.
[8] Histoire Naturelle, Suppl. tome 7ème, 1789.
[9] Camper, Œuvres, i. p. 56.
[10] Verhandelingen van het Bataviaasch Genootschap. Tweede Deel. Derde Druk. 1826.
[11] “Briefe des Herrn v. Wurmb und des H. Baron von Wollzogen. Gotha, 1794.”
[12] See Blumenbach, “Abbildungen Naturhistorichen Gegenstände,” No. 12, 1810; and Tilesius, “Naturhistoriche Früchte der ersten Kaiserlich-Russischen Erdumsegelung,” p. 115, 1813.
[13] Speaking broadly and without prejudice to the question, whether there be more than one species of Orang.
[14] See “Observations on the external characters and habits of the Troglodytes niger, by Thomas N. Savage, M.D., and on its organization, by Jeffries Wyman, M.D.,” Boston Journal of Natural History, vol. iv., 1843–4; and “External characters, habits, and osteology of Troglodytes Gorilla,”