53 
April 11, 1848. 
William Yarrell, Esq., Vice-President, in the Chair. 
The following paper was read to the meeting :— 
Supprementary Nore on THE GREAT CuIMpPaNnzEE (TROGLODYTES 
Goritta, Savage, Trocu. Savacer, Owen). By ProrEssor 
Owen, F.R.S. ere. 
Since the communication of my description of the skulls of the 
great Chimpanzee of the Gaboon district, I have received from an 
esteemed correspondent, Dr. Wyman, Professor of Anatomy in Har- 
vard University, United States, and a most accomplished anatomist 
and physiologist, a copy of his description of the parts of the skeleton 
of the great Chimpanzee which Dr. Savage had taken with him on 
his return to America, together with a preliminary and highly inter- 
esting sketch of the natural history of the species by its discoverer, 
who proposes to call it Troglodytes Gorilla, adopting the term used 
by Hanno in describing the wild men which he discovered on the 
coast of Africa during his famous voyage*. 
Dr. Wyman gives dimensions of the skulls of a male and female 
Troglodytes Gorilla, with comparative measurements of a character- 
istic skull of a negro, and those of the Troglodytes niger and Simia 
satyrus (Sumatran variety, or S. Abelii) from my Memoir in Trans. 
Zool. Soc. vol. i. p. 374; and he sums up the following points as 
showing that from the Troglodytes niger the Trogl. Gorilla “* is readily 
distinguished— 
«1. By its greater size; 
“2. By the size and form of the supraciliary ridges ; 
«3. By the existence of the large occipital and interparietal crests 
in the males, and by rudiments of the same in the females ; 
«4, By the great strength and arched form of the zygomatic 
arches ; 
“5. By the form of the anterior and posterior nasal orifices ; 
«6, By the structure of the infraorbitar canal ; 
“7, By the existence of an emargination on the posterior part of 
the hard palate ; 
‘©. The incisive alveoli do not project beyond the line of the rest 
of the face, as in the Chimpanzee and Orang ; 
“9. The distance between the nasal orifice and the edge of the 
incisive alveoli is less than in the Chimpanzee ; 
‘© 10. The ossa nasi are more narrow and compressed superiorly.” 
The 5th, 7th and 9th are the characters which are most decisively 
repeated in the Bristol specimens of the skulls of Trogl. Gorilla, and 
are those that are least ascribable to age or the operation of external 
* See the passage cited at p. 13, ‘Falconer’s Translation of the Voyage of 
Hanno,’ London, 1797. 
