372 QUADRUMANA. 



sent on an expedition of discovery, coasted Western Africa, and sailed 

 from Gades to the Island of Cerne (Arguim ?) in twelve days, and thence, 

 following the coast, he arrived, in seventeen days, at a promontory called the 

 West Horn (Cape Palmas ?), thence, skirting a burning shore, he arrived, 

 in three days, at the South Horn, and found an island inhabited by what 

 were regarded as wild men, called, by the interpreters, Gorilloi,* who 

 were covered with long black hair, and who fled for refuge to the moun- 

 tains, and defended themselves with stones. With some difficulty three 

 females were captured, the males having escaped ; but so desperately did 

 they fight, biting and tearing, that it was found necessary to kill them ; 

 their preserved skins were carried by Hanno to Carthage, and hung up 

 in one of the temples, as. consecrated trophies of his expedition, and as 

 specimens of a wild tribe in the remote regions of Africa, ever reputed 

 a " tellus monstrorum ferax." From this remote epoch a long interval 

 elapses before any definite or tangible accounts of the Chimpanzee are to 

 be collected. In the fifteenth century the western coast of Africa was, it 

 may be said, re-discovered ; and, in the following century, through the 

 medium of Europeans visiting Western Africa for the purposes of traffic, 

 the existence of an anthropomorphous Ape became known, about the 

 same time that the Orang-outan was discovered in the Islands of Borneo 

 and Sumatra. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that these 

 animals were, for a long time, regarded as the same, and that their re- 

 spective histories have been commingled. It is, indeed, only within the 

 last few years that they have been extricated from the maze of confusion 

 and misrepresentations with which travellers and naturalists concurred in 

 surrounding them, and, even now, much that concerns them is unknown. 

 With regard to the Chimpanzee, though Europeans have been long in the 

 habit of visiting, nay, though numbers permanently reside on the coast 

 of that portion of Western Africa which it inhabits, a full and lucid 

 account of its manners and economy, in a state of nature, is yet a desi- 

 deratum. 



The regions of Western Africa, to the extent of ten or twelve degrees 

 north, and as much south, of the torrid zone, including Guinea, Benin, 

 Congo, Angola, &c. constitute the habitat of the Chimpanzee,"'and, in 

 some districts, it would seem to be tolerably common. Bowditch (see 

 his Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, &c. Lond. 1819. 4to. 

 pp. 440-1) informs us that it is not rare at Gaboon, and that it is known 

 to the natives, under the names both of Inchego and Ingeno. From the 

 Negroes, whose accounts, coloured by fear and ignorance, are not to be 

 received without some allowance, he also learned that these animals, when 



* It is very probable that the word Gorilloi may be identical with the terms Drill and Mandrill old 

 African names still given in some districts to the Chimpanzee, and, therefore, belonging to it, rather than 

 to the Baboons, BO called by European naturalists. 



