THE FAUNA OF EQUATORIAL AFRICA. 291 



his whole story is a myth, that his most positive statements cannot 

 be depended upon, and that he probably passed his three years and 

 eight months vegetating on the coast, and obtained his natural 

 history specimens by barter with the natives at different ports ! 

 It is, we fear, owing to the somewhat over-zealous way in which he 

 has been taken up and made a " lion" of, that M. Du Chaillu has 

 provoked such severe criticisms upon his performances ; such, indeed, 

 as, in our opinion, ought not to have been put forward, until the most 

 positive and satisfactory evidence of the untruth of his statements 

 had been obtained. 



So much for M. Du Chaillu's volume of adventures. Now let us 

 take a glance at some of the more noticeable among the Mammals and 

 Birds that inhabit the countries he has discovered. To begin with 

 the Quadrumana. " That monstrous and ferocious ape," as our author 

 calls the Troglodytes gorilla, seems to be confined to a narrow belt of 

 forest land, immediately under the Equator. We shall not fill our 

 pages with extracts of what M. Du Chaillu has to say about this 

 animal, but beg of our readers, most of whom have probably done this 

 without waiting for our request, to turn to the original. With regard 

 to M. Du Chaillu's two supposed new species of Troglodytes, which 

 he has described in the " Proceedings" of the Boston Society of Natural 

 History, and named T. calvus and T. koulo-kamba* neither the 

 characters, as there given, nor the inspection of the skulls lying on the 

 tables in the Royal Geographical Society's Library have as yet quite 

 convincedus of their specific difference from the Chimpanzee (T.niger). 

 We may, however, remind our readers that a high authority — Profes- 

 sor Duvernoy,in one of his elaborate Memoirs on the large Anthropoid 

 Apes, which have been published in the " Archives du Museum d'His- 

 toire Naturelle,"f has already discriminated a Troglodytes TscJiego, 

 founded upon a skeleton obtained by M. Franquet during his resi- 

 dence as Chief Medical Officer on the Gaboon Station, and that it is 

 by no means impossible that one of M. Du Chaillu's supposed new 

 Apes may be referable to this species. 



Besides the genus Troglodytes, two other genera of highly organized 

 Quadrumana occur in Equatorial Africa : Colobus, represented by Mr. 

 Waterhouse's C. satanas, of which M. Du Chaillu has obtained several 

 examples, and Cercopithecus — a numerous group of Monkeys, quite 

 confined to and characteristic of, the ^Ethiopian Fauna. Of the latter 

 genus we have noticed among M. Du Chaillu's trophies, skins of 

 C. erythrotis, C. Campbellii, and 0. pogonias, and of 0. collaris — belong- 

 ing to the subgroup Cercocebus. It -appears to be the C. pogonias 

 (described from Furrier's skins by the late Mr. Bennett in 1833) that 

 M. Du Chaillu has inserted amongst his " new species" under the 

 specific name " nigripes"% Another scarce and interesting Monkey 



* See Journ. Boston S. N. H. vii. pp. 296-358. 



f See Archiv. du Museum d'Hist. Nat. vol. viii. p. 1 et seq. (Paris, 1855-6.) 



% See also Proc. B. S. N. H. vii. p. 360. 



