6 
NATURAL HISTORY. 
were larger than the corresponding modern species. They were as great Apes in their nature as 
are the present, and had this advantage, that their roaming ground was wider, for they lived 
in Europe as well as in the countries where their modern representatives are found. Nevertheless, 
even in those old days the Catarrhines were kept to the Old World, and the Platyrrhines enlivened 
the American forests alone. 
In the great order of the primates, after man, stand the man-shaped or anthropomorphous* 
Apes, the great tail-less. They are inhabitants of equatorial Africa, and of the great Asiatic 
islands and the adjacent mainland, and first and foremost amongst them is 
THE GORILLA. 
Africa, to the south of the great desert, has always been a country of wonders, and highly 
attractive to imaginative and restless men ; and its 
dark population, so ignorant and superstitious, has, 3 
2 
1 ~ 
1. FOOT AND HAND OF A MONKEY. 2. A CATARRH INE MONKEY. 3. A PLATYRRHINE MONKEY. 
4. MONKEY WITH CHEEK POUCHES. 
from its love of the marvellous, shadowed the truth with much mystery. Hence, travellers in 
those tropical regions, which are so fatal to Europeans, have from the earliest times told of the 
man-like creatures they had heard of and sometimes seen ; and they have associated them in the 
equatorial part of the continent with human dwarfs, pigmies, and monsters. For centuries these 
degraded human races have been sought after, and now whilst it is admitted that dwarfed men 
exist, it has come to light that most of the stones which led to the belief in their hideous asso- 
ciates were derived from the existence of large man-like Apes — creatures of dread to the natives — 
whose traditions are full of credulous anecdotes about them. Hidden in the recesses of vast forests, 
where the silence of nature is intense, and moving with great activity, where men can hardly follow, 
these animals acquired most doubtful reputations, and their ugly personal appearance, so suggestive 
of violence, was magnified in every way in the eyes of the timid natives. 
So dreaded were these Apes, and so environed were they with a superstitious mystery, that 
Europeans had travelled and traded close to their haunts for centuries before one of them was 
seen by any other eyes than those of the timid negroes. Many stories about them had long been 
* ''AvdpwTros, man ; /uop</>^, form or shape. 
