24 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXII. No. 549. 



poUion in deciphering for us records which 

 purport to show the prevalence of evolutionary- 

 ideas amongst Pelasgian races upwards of 

 2,000 years before Christ. 



Compared with this feat of modern philol- 

 ogists, the reading of the handwriting on the 

 wall, or of cuneiform inscriptions, is as mere 

 child's play, for in the present case the records 

 that have come down to us from proto- 

 Mycensean times are neither written nor in- 

 scribed. They are different from the papyrus 

 rolls obtained at Herculaneum, although, like 

 them, they have lain buried for ages in the 

 spot aptly termed by Fouque a ' prehistoric 

 Pompeii' (Thera). In what form, then, are 

 the records ? Vase-paintings, scenes and 

 symbols represented on ohjets d'art, — in a 

 word, pictographs! But we may read even 

 picture-writing, provided only we have the 

 key. This M. Coupin triumphantly declares 

 he has found : " Avec cette clef," says he, " on 

 pent lire sans difficulte une foule de petits 

 * rebus ' que personne ne comprendrait sans 

 elle." The key is furnished by a new inter- 

 pretation of the swastika, a design which 

 has been exhaustively discussed in this coun- 

 try by Thomas Wilson, in the Smithsonian Ee- 

 port for 1894, and more recently by Mrs. Zelia 

 Nuttall. That it is capable of unlocking ter- 

 rible and profound mysteries may be judged 

 from the following specimens of M. Coupin's 

 ' translation ' : 



On this bronze fibula (Fig. 11) one reads from 

 right to left: 'From aquatic animals (fishes), 

 through the generative force of the sacred octopus, 

 birds are descended.' On another design : ' Birds 

 have issued from the water by virtue of the 

 sacred octopus, or by a virtue analogous to that 

 of the sacred octopus. * * * ' 



Already we have had to endure learned dis- 

 putations tending to show that the far-famed 

 Polyphemus was founded upon seamen's ac- 

 counts of the gorilla, the present habitat of 

 that animal aifording no difficiilties to the 

 theorist; and within the last year or two, all 

 semblance of discrimination has been aban- 

 doned by certain German writers in their in- 

 terpretations of Homer's S cilia. Now that 

 we have encountered Darwinism in full swing 

 something like forty centuries ago, it remains 



only to bring to light a Coptic version of the 

 nebular hypothesis, or a table of lunar dis- 

 tances from the ruins of Yucatan. Through 

 abuses, even a good method may be brought 

 into undeserved reproach; and this seems to 

 be strikingly true of mythological interpreta- 

 tion. 



NAMES OF THE GORILLA AND ORANG-OUTAN. 



The discussion by Mr. Forbes in Nature 

 (LXIX., p. 343) on the derivation and proper 

 form of the word orang-outan, which in 

 Malay means ' forest-man,' leads one to in- 

 quire why the specific name of the gorilla, 

 first bestowed upon it by Savage in 1847, 

 should have become almost universally super- 

 seded by the title subsequently proposed by 

 .Owen. Authors who agree with Owen in re- 

 garding this ape as generically distinct from 

 the chimpanzee employ the designation Gorilla 

 for the genus, but not for the species. Thus, 

 Huxley in his ' Natural History of Man-like 

 Apes,' and Flower and Lydekker in their 

 treatise on ' Mammals ' refer to it as Gorilla 

 savagei. On the other hand, the older views 

 of Wyman and Savage are endorsed by such 

 expert mammalogists as P. L. Sclater and 

 Arthur Keith, who defend the appellation of 

 Anthropopithecus gorilla (Savage). 



It seems to be pretty clearly established 

 that only one species of the gorilla is known, 

 the scientific discoverer of which was Savage; 

 and to this species only one name is applicable, 

 which is that which has become everywhere 

 familiar in popular usage. The story of the 

 origin of the name is interesting, since it 

 harks back to the voyage of Hanno, the famous 

 Carthaginian navigator of the fifth century be- 

 fore our era. There is not the slightest reason 

 for discrediting the narrative of the ' gorillas,' 

 as related in the Periplus, Pliny confirming 

 the fact that their skins were exhibited in Car- 

 thage, and nearly all authorities agreeing 

 that the southernmost limit of the expedition, 

 where these animals were taken, was only a 

 few degrees above the equator. But the 

 identification of Hanno's ^ gorillas ' with an- 

 thropoid species now inhabiting equatorial 

 Africa is a more difficult matter, though it 

 appears certain they were not the apes which 



