16 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 



Meni-Pongo, meaning thereby Lord of Pongo / and that 

 the WPongues (as, in agreement with Dr. Savage, he 

 affirms the natives call themselves) term the estuary of the 

 Gaboon itself JV Pongo. 



It is so easy, in dealing with savages, to misunder- 

 stand their applications of words to things, that one is 

 at first inclined to suspect Battell of having confounded 

 the name of this region, where his " greater monster " 

 still abounds, with the name of the animal itself. But 

 he is so right about other matters (including the name 

 of the " lesser monster,") that one is loth to suspect the 

 old traveller of error ; and, on the other hand, we shall 

 find that a voyager of a hundred years' later date speaks 

 of the name " Boggoe," as applied to a great Ape, by 



Homo Syhestris, 

 Orang Outang, 



the inhabitants of quite 

 another part of Africa — 

 Sierra Leone. 



But I must leave this 

 question to be settled by 

 philologers and travel- 

 lers ; and I should hardly 

 have dwelt so long upon 

 it except for the curious 

 part played by this word 

 ' Pongo ' in the later his- 

 tory of the man-likeApes. 



The generation which 

 succeeded Battell saw the 

 first of the man-like Apes 

 which was ever brought 



Fig. 2.— The Orang of Tulpius, 1641. to Europe, or, at any 



rate, whose visit found a 

 historian. In the third book of Tulpius' " Observations 

 Medicse," published in 1641, the 56th chapter or section 



