Page:Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature.djvu/22

16 Meni-Pongo, meaning thereby Lord of Pongo; and that the N'Pongues (as, in agreement with Dr. Savage, he affirms the natives call themselves) term the estuary of the Gaboon itself N'Pongo.

It is so easy, in dealing with savages, to misunderstand their applications of words to things, that one is at first inclined to suspect Battell of having confounded the name of this region, where his "greater monster" still abounds, with the name of the animal itself. But he is so right about other matters (including the name of the "lesser monster,") that one is loth to suspect the old traveller of error; and, on the other hand, we shall find that a voyager of a hundred years' later date speaks of the name "Boggoe," as applied to a great Ape, by the inhabitants of quite another part of Africa—Sierra Leone.

But I must leave this question to be settled by philologers and travellers; and I should hardly have dwelt so long upon it except for the curious part played by this word Pongo in the later history of the man-like Apes.

The generation which succeeded Battell saw the first of the man-like Apes which was ever brought to Europe, or, at any rate, whose visit found a historian. In the third book of Tulpius' "Observationes Medicæ," published in 1641, the 56th chapter or section