OF ANIMAL SAGACITY. 25 



been regarded either as pure fictions or as gross exaggera- 

 tions of the truth ; and in either case his position his re- 

 putation as the describer of other incidents that were 

 only equally true, but for which he could better vouch from 

 direct personal knowledge, would have been weakened or 

 imperilled. 



The category of the apparently incredible in anecdote is 

 well illustrated by what used to be called ' travellers' tales.' 

 The suspected veracity of such tales, and of those who made 

 them public, is notorious. But it has been proved by modern 

 travellers over and over again that stories long regarded as 

 fabulous are, or have been, simple facts for instance, those 

 of Bruce as regards Abyssinia, of Du Chaillu as regards 

 Western Tropical Africa, of Livingstone as to Central Tro- 

 pical Africa, and of Humboldt and Waterton as to South 

 Tropical America. The history of the gorilla affords a 

 striking instance of the confirmation of old travellers' stories 

 by the researches of modern missionaries for instance, those 

 of Dr. Savage, the American missionary, in 1847. Purchas, 

 in 1613, on the authority of an Englishman Andrew Battel, 

 who had lived for some years in Congo described what he 

 called ' pongoes,' asserting inter alia that they * build shelters 

 for the raine .... and cover the dead with great heaps of 

 boughs and wood. . . . One of these pongoes took a negro 

 boy of his, which lived a month with them.' In point of 

 fact, the evidence of modern traveller-naturalists is of the 

 most important kind. I allude to such men as Humboldt, 

 Agassiz, Darwin, Wallace, Houzeau, Bates, Belt, Hooker, 

 Audubon, Wilson, Gould, Gillmore, and a host of others, 

 who, with competent natural history knowledge and the 

 desirable natural history tastes, had the inestimable advan- 

 tage of foreign travel more or less extensive and who have 

 made the best use of their opportunities of observation by 

 placing on record all that they saw noteworthy in animal 

 habits. 



Nor are we to regard ' old stories ' as fabulous simply 

 because of their age. Though I have, for the reasons 

 already specified, preferred modern to ancient anecdotes or 

 illustrations of animal intelligence as the basis of my own 



