418 PROFESSOR OWEN ON THE OSTEOLOGY OF 



Supplementary Note on the Great Chimpanzee (Troglodytes Gorilla, Savage, Troglodytes 

 Savagei, Owen, Proc. Zool. Soc. Febr. 1848). 



Since the communication of ray description of the skulls of the great Chimpanzee of 

 the Gaboon district, I have received from an esteemed correspondent, Prof. Wyman, 

 Professor of Anatomy in Harvard 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 interesting 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, or anthropoid apes, which he discovered on 

 the coast of Africa during his famous voyage*. 



Prof. Wyman gives dimensions of the skulls of a male and female Troglodytes Gorilla, 

 with comparative measurements of a characteristic 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 Tr. niger the Tr. 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 infraorbital canal ; 



" 7. By the existence of an emargination on the posterior part of the hard palate ; 



" 8. 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 Tr. Gorilla, and are those that are least ascribable to 

 age or the operation of external circumstances tending to produce a stronger variety of 

 Chimpanzee. The value of the character from size is established by the concurrence of 

 the foregoing more fixed ones. The supraciliary ridges are relatively as strongly deve- 

 loped and as prominent in the skull of a female adult Tr. niger as in that of the Tr. 

 Gorilla, and they are as angular and rough or uneven in the skull of the adult male 

 Tr. niger as in that of the adult male Tr. Gorilla. The male Tr. niger shows also the 

 median prominence between the orbits above the root of the nose. 



* See the passage cited at p. 13, ' Falconer's Translation of the Voyage of Hanno," London, 1797. 



