36 MEMOIR OF CAMPER. 



days with the discoveries of his own time, and 

 plays a laudable anxiety that every valuable fad 

 once ascertained, shall not be again lost to the ar- 

 chives of science. 



The introduction to this curious work on Mon- 

 keys, is mainly occupied in discussing what spe- 

 cies were known to the ancients ; and in this con- 

 nection he introduces about twelve of them to our 

 notice. This investigation naturally leads our author 

 to an interesting question, viz. How far the an- 

 cients, and especially Galen, in the composition of 

 his great work on anatomy, acquired his knowledge 

 directly from the human subject, or how far it was 

 inferred from the structure of the lower animals, 

 especially those most approximating to man, such as 

 the orang-outang. It would occupy too much time 

 to attempt even the shortest analysis of his observa- 

 tions and arguments on this subject, which, how- 

 ever, are extremely pertinent, and such as could not 

 easily be controverted. His conclusion is that Ga- 

 len, the favourite physician of Marcus Aurelius, and 

 proliably the most popular, as the most famous phy- 

 sician which Rome ever saw, had never dissected a 

 human subject, and made no use of such dissection 

 in the composition of his works on anatomy, and 

 other departments of medicine which have come 

 down to our times. 



The body of the work is divided into ten chapters, 

 which treat of the nomenclature of the orang-outang ; 

 its classification, involving that of the species most 



