July. 1896. THE STUDY OF THE GORILLA. 27 



Biological Beliefs, Methods, and Ends. — Scientific literature is 

 becoming so bulky and unwieldy, with every prospect of becoming 

 even more so, that it is of the utmost importance to come to some 

 understanding as to the aim and end of such a study as that of the 

 gorilla, and as to the methods by which the aim and end are to be 

 attained. This is all the more necessary since our biological beliefs, 

 our methods, our ultimate ends, are not those of the generations that 

 have left the records with which we have now to deal. The creed, 

 methods, and aims of the older anatomists were simple and primitive : 

 they believed an individual could represent its race ; the characters 

 of any one average specimen were exactly the same as the characters 

 of its species ; their methods lay in the dissection and description of 

 a certain type individual, with a commentary on its similarities and 

 dissimilarities when compared with its neighbours. By a judicious 

 grouping of similarities they sought to obtain a clear mental picture 

 of the higher primates in their true perspective relationship, with man 

 overtopping all and well apart from his anthropoid neighbours. In 

 fact, this most laudable aim — the segregation of the human race — has 

 occasioned the greater half of the research that has been done upon the 

 anthropoids ; the other half may be said to be due to museum-made 

 strife over the number of gibbon, orang, and chimpanzee species. 

 Hence the form in which we find the literature on the anthropoids — all 

 more or less polemical. Now these creeds, aims, and methods are gone : 

 they are dead as Bathybius. They have been gradually replaced by 

 the tenets of a race of workers that refuse to accept one, two, or even 

 five individuals, however selected, as fit to represent a species, as 

 much as they deny the possibility of any one man embodying the 

 characteristics of his nation. A species, they believe, can be repre- 

 sented in its full and absolute truth — were it possible — only by a 

 dissection, description, and tabulation of every part of every living 

 individual of that species. For example, if the individuals that make 

 up the present living race of gorillas were superimposed muscle on 

 muscle, artery on artery, brain-convolution on brain-convolution, the 

 result would be, not the clear outline of a typical individual, but 

 rather an amoeboid form with a considerable amplitude of variation 

 in certain well-defined directions. This newer mental picture of a 

 species, then, is of an amoeboid form with the lines of variation 

 thrown out as pseudopodia, which may be regarded as feelers co- 

 ordinating the race with its surroundings. Such a conception of the 

 species by the modern biologist has necessarily led to a change in his 

 methods. They are still, of course, dissection, description, and 

 tabulation, though not of one, but of many individuals: few anatomists 

 would accept less than one hundred individuals to represent a 

 species. What is wanted first and most for the animal with which we 

 are at present dealing is a thorough and minute dissection of one 

 gorilla to act as a standard for future workers. There is only one 

 description that nearly approximates to such a standard — Deniker's 



