16 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 



Ho7no Syhestris. 

 OranQ Outang. 



Meni-PongOy meaning tlierebj Lord of Pongo / and that 

 the N^Pongues (as, m agreement with Dr. Savage, he 

 affirms the natives call themselves) term the estnary of the 

 Gaboon itself N^ Pongo. 



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

 stand their ap]3lications 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 



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 

 to Europe, or, at any 

 ■ rate, whose visit found a 

 historian. In the third book of Tulpius' " Observationes 

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



Fig. 2.— The Orang of Tulpius, 1641. 



