Project Gutenberg's Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature, by Thomas H. Huxley

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Title: Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature

Author: Thomas H. Huxley

Posting Date: November, 2001
Release Date: January 6, 2009 [EBook #2931]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAN'S PLACE ***

Produced by Amy E. Zelmer

EVIDENCE AS TO MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE

By Thomas H. Huxley

1863

[entire page is illustration with caption as follows]

Skeletons of the GIBBON. ORANG. CHIMPANZEE. GORILLA. MAN.
'Photographically reduced from Diagrams of the natural size (except
that of the Gibbon, which was twice as large as nature), drawn by Mr.
Waterhouse Hawkins from specimens in the Museum of the Royal College of
Surgeons.

ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE MAN-LIKE APES

Ancient traditions, when tested by the severe processes of modern
investigation, commonly enough fade away into mere dreams: but it is
singular how often the dream turns out to have been a half-waking one,
presaging a reality. Ovid foreshadowed the discoveries of the geologist:
the Atlantis was an imagination, but Columbus found a western world: and
though the quaint forms of Centaurs and Satyrs have an existence only
in the realms of art, creatures approaching man more nearly than they
in essential structure, and yet as thoroughly brutal as the goat's
or horse's half of the mythical compound, are now not only known, but
notorious.

I have not met with any notice of one of these MAN-LIKE APES of earlier
date than that contained in Pigafetta's 'Description of the Kingdom
of Congo,' [1] drawn up from the notes of a Portuguese sailor, Eduardo
Lopez, and published in 1598. The tenth chapter of this work is entitled
"De Animalibus quae in hac provincia reperiuntur," and contains a brief
passage to the effect that "in the Songan country, on the banks of the
Zaire, there are multitudes of apes, which afford great delight to the
nobles by imitating human gestures." As this might apply to almost any
kind of apes, I should have thought little of it, had not the brothers
De Bry, whose engravings illustrate the work, thought fit, in their
eleventh 'Ar