270 
THE WILD MAJT Or THE WOODS. 
Simia capucina, the Simia apella, the Simia trepida, and the 
other weeping monkeys hitherto so confusedly described. 
This little animal is as gentle as it is ugly. A monkey of 
this species, which was kept in the courtyard of the mis- 
sionary, would frequently mount on the back of a pig, and 
in this manner traverse the savannahs. ¥e have also seen 
it upon the hack of a large cat, which had been brought up 
with it in Father Zea’s house. 
It was among the cataracts that we began to hear of the 
hairy man of the woods, called salvage, that carries off 
women, constructs huts, and sometimes eats human flesh. 
The Tamanacs call it achi, and the Maypurcs vasitri, or 
‘great devil.’ The natives and the missionaries have no 
doubt of the existence of this man-shaped monkey, of which 
they entertain a singular dread. Father Grili gravely relates 
the history of a lady in the town of San Carlos, in the 
Llanos of Venezuela, who much praised the gentle character 
and attentions of the man of the woods. She is stated to 
have lived several years with one in great domestic harmony, 
and only requested some hunters to take her back, “ because 
she and her children (a little hairy also) were weary of 
living far from the church and the sacraments.” The same 
author, notwithstanding his credulity, acknowledges that be 
never knew an Indian who asserted positively that he had 
seen the salvage with his own eyes. This wild legend, 
which the missionaries, the European planters, and the 
negroes of Africa, have no doubt embellished with many 
features taken from the description of the manners of the 
orang-otang,* the gibbon, the jocko or chimpanzee, and the 
pongo, followed us, during five years, from the northern to 
the southern hemisphere. We were everywhere blamed, 
in the most cultivated class of society, for being the only 
persons to doubt the existence of the great anthropomorphous 
* Simia satyrus. We must not believe, notwithstanding the assertin' 1 ® 
of almost all zoological writers, that the word orang-otang is appl> e _ 
exclusively in the Malay language to the Simia satyrus of Borneo. Th' 3 
expression, on the contrary, means any very large monkey, that resemble 
man in figure. (Marsden’s Hist, of Sumatra, 3rd edit., p. 1 17.) Modern 
zoologists have arbitrarily appropriated provincial names to certain species , 
and by continuing to prefer these names, strangely disfigured in tbe> r 
orthography, to the Latin systematic names, the confusion of the nomen- 
clature has been increased. 
