

270 THE WILD MAS OF THE WOODS. 



Simla capucina, the Simia ajiella, the Simia trepida, and the 

 other weeping monkeys hitherto so confusedly described. 

 This little animal is as gentle as it is ugly. A monkey of 

 this species, which was kept in the courtyard of the mis- 

 sionary, would frequently mount on the back of a pig, and 

 in this manner traverse the savannahs. "We have also seen 

 it upon the back of a large cat, which had been brought up 

 with it in Father Zea's house. 



It was among the cataracts that we began to hear of the 

 hairy man of the woods, called salvaje, that carries off 

 women, constructs huts, and sometimes eats human flesh. 

 The Tamanacs call it achi, and the Maypures vasitri, or 

 'great devil.' The natives and the missionaries have no 

 doubt of the existence of this man-shaped monkey, of which 

 they entertain a singular dread. Father Grili gravely relates 

 the history of a lady in the town of San Carlos, in the 

 Llanos of Venezuela, who much praised the gentle character 

 and attentions of the man of the woods. She is stated to 

 have lived several years with one in great domestic harmony, 

 and only requested some hunters to take her back, " because 

 she and her children (a little hairy also) were weary of 

 living far from the church and the sacraments." The same 

 author, notwithstanding his credulity, acknowledges that he 

 never knew an Indian who asserted positively that he had 

 seen the salvaje with his own eyes. This wild legend, 

 which the missionaries, the European planters, and the 

 negroes of Africa, have no doubt embellished with many 

 features taken from the description of the manners of the 

 orang-otaug,* the gibbon, the jocko or chimpanzee, and the 

 pongo, followed us, during five years, from the northern to 

 the southern hemisphere. "We were everywhere blamed, 

 in the most cultivated class of society, for being the only 

 persons to doubt the existence of the great anthropomorphous 



* Simia satyrus. We must not believe, notwithstanding the assertions 

 of almost all zoological writers, that the word orang-otang is applied 

 exclusively in the Malay language to the Simia satyrus of Borneo. This 

 expression, on the contrary, means any very large monkey, that resembles 

 man in figure. (Marsden's Hist, of Sumatra, 3rd edit., p. 117.) Modern 

 zoologists have arbitrarily appropriated provincial names to certain species ; 

 And by continuing to prefer these names, strangely disfigured in their 

 orthography, to the Latin systematic names, the confusion of the nomen- 

 clature has been increased. 



