18 THE HUMAN KINGDOM. 



says, "is an animal of prey, with no other enjoyment than 

 eating : and, guided by no principle and no reason, he de- 

 vours as long as he can, and all that he can procure, like 

 the vulture and the tiger/'* And, farther on, "The Es- 

 quimaux eats but to sleep, and sleeps but to eat again as 

 soon as he can."f We shall descend still lower, in order 

 to find out men who are so degraded, that those who have 

 seen them have stated, that if they were in thick bushes 

 or the shadows of the forest, they would hardly have known 

 whether they were apes or men. And, let attention be paid to 

 this, these wretched beings, almost deprived of human form, 

 do not inhabit a poor or secluded country, but the continent 

 of Asia, to the south of the Himalaya chain, in the centre of 

 Hindoostan, in those regions which have been the cradle of 

 several huge species of apes, at that epoch, doubtless, when 

 the islands of the Indian Archipelago were joined to Asia, and 

 formed one immense continent, the land of the Malay race. J 



In 1824, an English colonist, Mr. Piddington, a settler in 

 ,the centre of Hindoostan (towards Palmow, Subhulpore, and 

 the upper basin of the Nerbudda), relates that he saw amongst 

 a party of Dhangour workmen, who came every year to 

 work on his plantation, a man and a woman who were ex- 

 tremely strange and uncouth, and whom the Dhangours them- 

 selves called monkey -people. They had a language of their 

 own. From so much as could be understood by signs, it was 

 discovered that they lived far beyond the country of the 

 Dhangours, in the forests and in the mountains, and possessed 

 few villages. It would seem that the man had fled with the 

 woman in consequence of some misfortune, perhaps a murder. 

 But at all events, they were found by the Dhangours lost in 

 the woods, exhausted, and almost dead from hunger. They 

 disappeared suddenly one night, just as Mr. Piddington had 



* J. Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage, etc., 1835, p. 448. 



f J. Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage, p. 490. 



J See Etienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, Comptes Rendus, vol. v, p. 42. [We 

 should very much like to know at what period our author imagines this to 

 have been the case, and whether he considers that these apes were the " men 

 of the day." EDITOR.] 



" Memorandum on an Unknown Forest Race," etc., Journal of the Asiatic 

 Society of Bengal, 1855, vol. xxiv, p. 207. 



