21 



Sillimani of Koch, a factitious Saurian of huge length, suc- 

 cessfully exhibited in New York and elsewhere under high 

 auspices, and I think also in Germany, but which Dr. Wy- 

 man exposed at sight, showing that it was made up of an 

 indefinite number of various cetaceous vertebras, belonging 

 to many individuals, which (as was afterward ascertained) 

 were collected from several localities. 



But the memoir by which Prof. Wyman assured his posi- 

 tion among the higher comparative anatomists was that, 

 communicated to and published by this Society in the 

 summer of 1847, in which the Gorilla was first named and 

 introduced to the scientific world, and the distinctive struc- 

 ture and affinities of the animal so thoroughly made out 

 from the study of the skeleton, that there was, as the great 

 English Anatomist remarked, "very little left to add, and 

 nothing to correct." In this memoir the " Description of the 

 habits of Troglodytes Gorilla" is by Dr. Thomas S. Savage, 

 to whom, along with Dr. Wilson, "belongs the credit of the 

 discovery"; the Osteology of the same and the introductory 

 history are by Dr. Wyman. Indeed* nearly all since made 

 known of the Gorilla's structure, and of the affinities soundly 

 deduced therefrom, has come from our associate's subsequent 

 papers, founded on additional crania brought to him in 1849, 

 by Dr. George A. Perkins of Salem ; on a nearly entire male 

 skeleton of unusual size, received in 1852, from the Rev. Wil- 

 liam Walker, and now in Wyman's museum; and on a large 

 collection of skins and skeletons placed at his disposal in 

 1859, by Du Chaillu, along with a young Gorilla in spirits, 

 which he dissected. It is in the account of this dissection 

 that Prof. Wyman brings out the curious fact that the skull 



