Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/398

380 widely-spread anthropoid story, which relates how great apes like the gorilla and the orang-utan carry off women to their homes in the woods, much as the Apaches and Comanches of our own time carry off to their prairies the women of North Mexico. And on the other hand, popular opinion has under-estimated the man as much as it has over-estimated the monkey. We know how sailors and emigrants can look on savages as senseless, ape-like brutes, and how some writers on anthropology have contrived to make out of the moderate intellectual difference between an Englishman and a negro something equivalent to the immense interval between a negro and a gorilla. Thus we can have no difficulty in understanding how savages may seem mere apes to the eyes of men who hunt them like wild beasts in the forests, who can only hear in their language a sort of irrational gurgling and barking, and who fail totally to appreciate the real culture which better acquaintance always shows among the rudest tribes of man. It is well known that when Sanskrit legend tells of the apes who fought in the army of King Hanuman, it really refers to those aborigines of the land who were driven by the Aryan invaders to the hills and jungles, and whose descendants are known to us as Bhils, Kols, Sonthals, and the like, rude tribes such as the Hindu still speaks of as 'monkey-people.' One of the most perfect identifications of the savage and the monkey in Hindustan is the following description of the bunmanus, or 'man of the woods' (Sanskr. vana=wood, manusha=man). 'The bunmanus is an animal of the monkey kind. His face has a near resemblance to