1 58 THE MONKE Y FAMIL Y. 



full of monsters in the wilderness, my readers of the " Wanderings " 

 would indeed have had reason to condemn my credulity. I have 

 heard even white men express their firm belief, that animals exist in 

 the wilds of Guiana, surpassing those which are spoken of in Ovid's 

 Metamorphoses. 



But travellers in Africa seem to take the lead in zoological 

 romance. One of these gentlemen of fabricating talent, or of most 

 extraordinary gullet, positively asserts, that the apes called pongos, 

 " kill many negroes that travel in the woods." " Many times," 

 continues he, " they fall upon the elephants, which come to feed 

 where they are, and so beat them with their clubbed fists, and pieces 

 of wood, that they will run roaring away from them." Lamentable 

 blotches on the page of African zoology ! Our author further adds, 

 on the testimony of the same recounter of pongos belabouring 

 elephants, that " a pongo ape carried off a young negro, who lived a 

 whole year in the society of these animals." Disagreeable society, no 

 doubt, for the poor little human captive ! But pray, let me ask, who 

 cooked its victuals? Apes in the woods live upon raw vegetable 

 substance, by no means suited to the taste of, or calculated to 

 nourish one of, our own species. Did it get its daily food at the 

 breast of a pongo wet nurse? Whilst this poor hapless infant 

 sojourned amongst the apes, perhaps, it even had not once the 

 luxury of regaling itself with a handful of unroasted coffee, or with a 

 scanty slice of raw pork luxuries occasionally abundant in our late 

 eastern expedition. 



Again, our author quotes other travellers, who assure us that " the 

 /orang-outangs carry off girls of eight and ten years of age, to the 

 tops of trees, and that it is extremely difficult to rescue them." 

 Most difficult, no doubt ; can any person, for one moment, doubt 

 the difficulty of such a dangerous and of such an arduous task? I 

 don't know how I myself, with a young lady in my arms, would be 

 able to set about it, although I am just now pretty nimble in 

 getting up a tree. Poor hapless damsels ! tedious and disgust- 

 ing, indeed, must have been your awful journey upwards, whilst 

 in the arms of a villainous ape ! Say, what kind of a resting- 

 place did ye find "on the tops of the trees?" Did the knave 

 of a pongo ape leave you in that perilous position aloft, until some 



