318 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



self to foreigners who visited the river, and of receiving charity from 

 them." 



Prof. Owen designates this new species of anthropoid animal, as 

 the " Great Chimpanzee." The Mipongwes (natives inhabiting the 

 banks of the Gaboon) call it the Enge-ena, a name considered by Dr. 

 Wyman as more appropriate, since the term Chimpanzee has always 

 been associated with the black or smaller species. Compiled from a 

 paper furnished by Dr. Jeffries Wyman. 



THE GHILANES, OR MEN WITH TAILS. 



COL. Du COURET, the distinguished African traveller, who has re- 

 cently left Paris to renew his explorations in that country under the 

 auspices of the French government, has addressed to the Academy of 

 Sciences a paper containing an apparent confirmation of the existence 

 of a race in the interior of Africa, the members of which are furnished 

 with tails. The report has been much ridiculed, as an attempt to impose 

 upon the world, but Col. Du Couret would not choose the French 

 Academy as the body to which he would address his memoir, if that 

 were his object. 



These people, according to travellers, are originally of the king- 

 dom of Gondar. They have a tail-like appendage, formed by the elon- 

 gation of the vertebral column, and they are the last link in the hu- 

 man race. The slave-merchants cannot dispose of them without 

 great difficulty, so bad is their reputation. The traits which distin- 

 guish them are hideous ugliness of face and figure, ungovernable 

 tempers and stolid intellect. Some of this race are to be found also 

 in the Philippine Islands, but they were doubtless carried thither by 

 the slave-merchants. However this may be, when a Levantine is 

 looking out for slaves in the East, he is always warned not to pur- 

 chase one who has a tail ; he is told, " Of all slaves they are the least 

 profitable." 



"In 1842, I lived at Mecca," says M. cle Couret, "and, being 

 often at the house of an Emir with whom I was intimate, I spoke to 

 him of the Ghilane race, and told him how much the Europeans doubt- 

 ed the existence of men with tails; that is to say, with the vertebral 

 column elongated externally. In order to convince me of the reality 

 of the species, the Emir ordered before me one of his slaves, called 

 Belial, who was about thirty years old, who had a tail, and who be- 

 longed to this tribe. On surveying this man I was thoroughly con- 

 vinced. He spoke Arabic well, and appeared rather intelligent. He 

 told me that, in his country, far beyond the Sennaar, which he had 

 crossed, they spoke a different language ; this, for want of practice, 

 he had entirely forgotten; that of his countrymen, whom he estimat- 

 ed at thirty or forty thousand, some worshipped the sun, the moon, 

 or stars, others the serpent, and the sources of an immense river, in 

 which they immolated their victims (probably the Nile) ; that they 

 ate with delight raw flesh, as bloody as possible, and that they loved 

 human flesh above all things ; that, after their battles with the neigh- 

 bouring tribes, they slaughtered and devoured their prisoners without 



