1855.] Anthropoid Apes y and their relations to Man. 27 



by the imposition of hands of believers, to move against gravity, 

 tilt up, and dance about. We know that this belief had become so 

 scandalously prevalent, as to make our excellent friend, the FuUerian 

 Professor, deem it worth his while to deal it a crushing blow of his 

 intellectual sledge-hammer. 



The present age may be more knowing, but can it truly flatter 

 itself as being wiser, more logical, and less credulous than that of 

 Cudworth and More ? As numerous and respectable eye-witnesses, 

 in the seventeenth century, vouched for the transit of witches on 

 broomsticks through the air ; as, in the nineteenth, have testified to 

 table-tilting and table-turning ! And whether the occult influence 

 over-ruling the law of gravitation charges a discoid or cylindrical 

 substance — oozes from the palm of the hand, or emanates from 

 another part of the body — matters not. 



AVe ignore Satanic influences now-a-days, as a general rule. An 

 impulse, said to be uncontrollable because uncontrolled, and a 

 " black-cloud " over the mind, form grounds for acquitting the 

 adulterous prolicide : of old, it would have been referred, in good 

 earnest, to " the instigation of the devil," and an exemplary judgment 

 would have followed the belief. It may be doubted whether the fear- 

 fully increasing number of acquittals, and of " merciful recommend- 

 ations " of murderers, be a sign of the superior wisdom_^and humanity 

 of our times. 



But, returning to the sphere of that " lower wisdom, which rests 

 in the contemplation of natural causes and dimensions," seeing that 

 notions, refuted and repudiated centuries ago, are, in our day, 

 revived and popularised, with a semblance of support from the 

 later acquisitions of science, it is meet that they should be brought 

 to the test of the exact results of modem inquiry : and this was the 

 aim the Professor had in view in treating of the organical characters 

 of the highest of the brute creation and their relations to those of 

 the human species. 



For about two centuries, naturalists have been cognizant of a 

 small ape, tailless, without cheek-pouches, and without the ischial 

 callosities, clothed with black hair, with a facial angle of about 60°, 

 and of a physiognomy milder and more human-like than in the 

 ordinary race of monkeys, less capricious, less impulsive in its 

 habits, more staid and docile. This species, brought from the West 

 Coast of Africa, is that which our anatomist, Tyson, dissected : he 

 described the main features of its organisation in his work published 

 in 1699. He called it the Homo Sylvestris, or pigmy. It is noted 

 by Linnaeus, in some editions of his Systema Nature, as the Homo 

 Troglodytes. Blumenbach, giving a truer value to the condition of 

 the innermost digit of the hind foot, which was like a thumb, called 

 it the Simla Troglodytes; it afterwards became more commonly 

 known as the " Chimpanzee." 



At a later period, naturalists became acquainted with a similar 

 kind of ape, of quiet docile disposition, with the same sad, human- 



