ANTHROPOID APES. 525 



pongos will come and seat about tlie fire till it goeth out, for they 

 have no understanding to lay the wood together. They goe many 

 together, and kill many negroes that travaile in the woods. Many 

 times they fall upon elephants which come to feed where they be, 

 and so beat them with their clubbed fists and pieces of wood that 

 they will runne roaring away from them. The pongos are never 

 taken alive, because they are so strong ten men cannot hold one 

 of them ; but they take many of their young ones with poisoned 

 arrows. The young pongo hangeth on his mother's belly with his 

 hands fast clasped about her, so that, when the country people 

 kiU any of the females, they take the young which hangs fast upon 

 the mother. When they die among themselves, they cover the 

 dead with great heapes of boughs and wood, which is commonly 

 found in the forests." 



Selecting the parts that may be considered as truthful from 

 those which are evidently fiction, and comparing them with the 

 subsequent information that has been obtained, it is probable that 

 the pongo is the gorilla and the engeco the chimpanzee. To 

 some extent this is corroborated by the fact that the natives of 

 the Gaboon still call the latter animal the enche-eho. 



Various other travellers, of a much later date, have made sundry 

 references to the fearful hairy monsters in man's shape that they 

 had heard about while in Africa. These animals were, according 

 to these narrations, possessed of powers that enabled them to slay 

 not only elephants and lions, but all men with whom they 

 came in contact. These accounts have not died out yet, although 

 they have been shown to be perfectly devoid of truth, and some 

 writers, generally those' that provide the works advertised as 

 having been " written for the instruction of the young " (?) still 

 inform their youthful readers that the poor natives when wander- 

 ing in company through the shades of their beautiful forests will 

 suddenly observe one of their number to be missing, and discover 

 that before he could utter a sound he had been caught at the throat 

 by the long arms of a terrible man-slaying ape which had lain in 

 wait for its prey, and in its vice-like grip the victim had been 

 quickly carried to the topmost branches of a tree, from whence a 

 few seconds later would descend a strangled and a mangled corpse 



