THE MONKE Y FAMIL Y. 157 



was delicately white wherever his clothing had defended it from the 

 scorching rays of the sun. In fact, I found his skin in all respects 

 the same as my own, saving that, where the sun had given mine the 

 appearance of mahogany, his was blotched with broad freckles of a 

 lighter tint. In all other respects, he was in reality a negro from 

 head to foot ; for his hair was curly, and his nose depressed, his lips 

 protuberant, and his ears as small as those of a genuine coal-black 

 son of Africa. He stood apparently about five feet nine inches in 

 height, with a finely-expanded chest, and with a back as straight as 

 an arrow. But he was deficient in the calves of his legs, which latter 

 were rather inclined to be what we should term bandy; whilst you 

 could not help remarking the protrusion of his heels, so noted in the 

 negro. Both his father and his mother were healthy, jet-black 

 negroes ; so that Bochra Jem could not by any chance be a mulatto, 

 or of any of those castes which are removed from the breed of half 

 black and half white, constituting a true mulatto. I should say that 

 he was twenty years old, or thereabouts, but I did not ask his age. 

 Probably he was the only white negro ever seen in Demerara. On 

 taking leave of him, I put a dollar into his hand for the trouble I 

 had caused him. His dark eye brightened up, whilst he smiled con- 

 tentedly through a set of white teeth, and, as I went out of the room, 

 he said, " God bless you, massa." A few years after this, on my 

 return from England to the wilds of Guiana, I stopped for a couple 

 of days in Stabroek, and went to the house where Jem resided. But 

 death had claimed him. He had died, they told me, " somewhat 

 suddenly, about nine months ago." His owner remarked, that poor 

 Jemmy's strange appearance was much against his mixing with his 

 brethren, who at times would turn him into ridicule. Had this good 

 lady read the Latin classics, I would have observed to her that, 

 whilst " alba ligustra cadunt, vaccinia nigra leguntur" 



I have not yet quite done with my remarks on what travellers say 

 of the orang-outang. I marvel that a naturalist, so discerning and 

 so clever as he whose history of this ape I have quoted, should have 

 selected his materials from the reports of some and the writings of 

 others, which deserve neither credence nor attention. In fact, their 

 accounts of the orang-outang are manifest absurdities. 



Had I but lent a willing ear to tales of some whose minds were 



