69 



gorilla, although they prove its nearer approach to man than any 

 other tailless ape, have not in any degree affected or invalidated 

 the conclusions at which I then arrived. 



Since the date of that memoir, skeletons and the entire carcase 

 preserved in spirits of the gorilla have successively reached the 

 Museums of Paris, Vienna, and London; and have formed the 

 subjects of several memoirs, the results of the recorded observa- 

 tions differing only in regard to the interpretation of the facts. 



Dr Wyman, the accomplished anatomical professor at Boston, 

 U.S., agrees with the writer in referring the gorilla to the same 

 genus as the chimpanzee (Troglodytes), but he regards the latter as 

 more nearly allied to the human kind. 



Professors Duvernoy and Isidore Geoffroy St Hilaire consider 

 the differences in the osteology, dentition, and outward character 

 of the gorilla to be of generic importance; and they e*nter the 

 species in the zoological catalogues as Gorilla gina, the trivial 

 name being that by which the animal is called by the natives of 

 Gaboon; the French naturalists also concur with the American in 

 placing the gorilla below the chimpanzee in the zoological scale; 

 and some have more lately been disposed to place both below the 

 siamangs, gibbons or long-armed apes (Hylobates). 



The following are the principal external characters of the 

 Gorilla exhibited by the specimen preserved in spirits which was 

 received in 1858, at the British Museum, and is now mounted 

 and exhibited in the Mammalian Gallery. My attention was first 

 attracted by the shortness, almost absence, of neck, due to the back- 

 ward position of the junction of the head to the trunk, to the great 

 length of the cervical spines, causing the 'nape' to project beyond 

 the 'occiput,' to the great size and elevation of the scapulae, and 

 to the oblique rising of the clavicles from their sternal attachments 

 to above the level of the angles of the jaw. The brain-case, low 

 and narrow, and the lofty ridges of the skull, make the cranial 

 profile pass in almost a straight line from the occiput to the super- 

 orbital ridge, the prominence of which gives the most forbidding 

 feature to the physiognomy of the gorilla; the thick integument 

 overlapping that ridge forming a scowling pent-house over the 

 eyes. The nose is more prominent than in the chimpanzee or 

 orang-utan, not only at its lower expanded part, but at its upper 

 half, where a slight prominence corresponds with that which the 

 author had previously pointed out in the nasal bones. The mouth 

 is very wide, the lips large, of uniform thickness, the upper one. 



