Chapter 19

M. Flourens cannot imagine an unconscious selection--it is for him a contradiction in terms. Did M. Flourens ever visit one of the prettiest watering-places of "la belle France," the Baie d'Arcachon? If so, he will probably have passed through the district of the Landes, and will have had an opportunity of observing the formation of "dunes" on a grand scale. What are these "dunes"? The winds and waves of the Bay of Biscay have not much consciousness, and yet they have with great care "selected," from among an infinity of masses of silex of all shapes and sizes, which have been submitted to their action, all the grains of sand below a certain size, and have heaped them by themselves over a great area. This sand has been "unconsciously selected" from amidst the gravel in which it first lay with as much precision as if man had "consciously selected" it by the aid of a sieve. Physical Geology is full of such selections--of the picking out of the soft from the hard, of the soluble from the insoluble, of the fusible from the infusible, by natural agencies to which we are certainly not in the habit of ascribing consciousness.

But that which wind and sea are to a sandy beach, the sum of influences, which we term the "conditions of existence," is to living organisms. The weak are sifted out from the strong. A frosty night "selects" the hardy plants in a plantation from among the tender ones as effectually as if it were the wind, and they, the sand and pebbles, of our illustration; or, on the other hand, as if the intelligence of a gardener had been operative in cutting the weaker organisms down. The thistle, which has spread over the Pampas, to the destruction of native plants, has been more effectually "selected" by the unconscious operation of natural conditions than if a thousand agriculturists had spent their time in sowing it.

It is one of Mr. Darwin's many great services to Biological science that he has demonstrated the significance of these facts. He has shown that--given variation and given change of conditions--the inevitable result is the exercise of such an influence upon organisms that one is helped and another is impeded; one tends to predominate, another to disappear; and thus the living world bears within itself, and is surrounded by, impulses towards incessant change.

But the truths just stated are as certain as any other physical laws, quite independently of the truth, or falsehood, of the hypothesis which Mr. Darwin has based upon them; and that M. Flourens, missing the substance and grasping at a shadow, should be blind to the admirable exposition of them, which Mr. Darwin has given, and see nothing there but a "derniere erreur du dernier siecle"--a personification of Nature--leads us indeed to cry with him: "O lucidite! O solidite de l'esprit Francais, que devenez-vous?"

M. Flourens has, in fact, utterly failed to comprehend the first principles of the doctrine which he assails so rudely. His objections to details are of the old sort, so battered and hackneyed on this side of the Channel, that not even a Quarterly Reviewer could be induced to pick them up for the purpose of pelting Mr. Darwin over again. We have Cuvier and the mummies; M. Roulin and the domesticated animals of America; the difficulties presented by hybridism and by Palaeontology; Darwinism a 'rifacciamento' of De Maillet and Lamarck; Darwinism a system without a commencement, and its author bound to believe in M. Pouchet, etc. etc. How one knows it all by heart, and with what relief one reads at p. 65--

"Je laisse M. Darwin!"

But we cannot leave M. Flourens without calling our readers' attention to his wonderful tenth chapter, "De la Preexistence des Germes et de l'Epigenese," which opens thus:--

"Spontaneous generation is only a chimera. This point established, two hypotheses remain: that of 'pre-existence' and that of 'epigenesis'. The one of these hypotheses has as little foundation as the other." (P. 163.)

"The doctrine of 'epigenesis' is derived from Harvey: following by ocular inspection the development of the new being in the Windsor does, he saw each part appear successively, and taking the moment of 'appearance' for the moment of 'formation' he imagined 'epigenesis'." (P. 165.)

On the contrary, says M. Flourens (p. 167),

"The new being is formed at a stroke (tout d'un coup) as a whole, instantaneously; it is not formed part by part, and at different times. It is formed at once at the single 'individual' moment at which the conjunction of the male and female elements takes place."

It will be observed that M. Flourens uses language which cannot be mistaken. For him, the labours of von Baer, of Rathke, of Coste, and their contemporaries and successors in Germany, France, and England, are non-existent: and, as Darwin "imagina" natural selection, so Harvey "imagina" that doctrine which gives him an even greater claim to the veneration of posterity than his better known discovery of the circulation of the blood.

Language such as that we have quoted is, in fact, so preposterous, so utterly incompatible with anything but absolute ignorance of some of the best established facts, that we should have passed it over in silence had it not appeared to afford some clue to M. Flourens' unhesitating, a priori, repudiation of all forms of the doctrine of progressive modification of living beings. He whose mind remains uninfluenced by an acquaintance with the phenomena of development, must indeed lack one of the chief motives towards the endeavour to trace a genetic relation between the different existing forms of life. Those who are ignorant of Geology, find no difficulty in believing that the world was made as it is; and the shepherd, untutored in history, sees no reason to regard the green mounds which indicate the site of a Roman camp, as aught but part and parcel of the primeval hill-side. So M. Flourens, who believes that embryos are formed "tout d'un coup," naturally finds no difficulty in conceiving that species came into existence in the same way.

End of Criticisms on "The Origin of Species".

EVIDENCE AS TO MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE

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,'* 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 'Argumentum,' to figure two of these "Simiae magnatum deliciae." So much of the plate as contains these apes is faithfully copied in the woodcut (Figure 1), and it will be observed that they are tail-less, long-armed, and large-eared; and about the size of Chimpanzees. It may be that these apes are as much figments of the imagination of the ingenious brothers as the winged, two-legged, crocodile-headed dragon which adorns the same plate; or, on the other hand, it may be that the artists have constructed their drawings from some essentially faithful description of a Gorilla or a Chimpanzee. And, in either case, though these figures are worth a passing notice, the oldest trustworthy and definite accounts of any animal of this kind date from the 17th century, and are due to an Englishman. ([Footnote] * REGNUM CONGO: hoc est VERA DESCRIPTIO REGNI AFRICANI QUOD TAM AB INCOLIS QUAM LUSITANIS CONGUS APPELLATUR, per Philippum Pigafettam, olim ex Edoardo Lopez acroamatis lingua Italica excerpta, num Latio sermone donata ab August. Cassiod. Reinio. Iconibus et imaginibus rerum memorabilium quasi vivis, opera et industria Joan. Theodori et Joan. Israelis de Bry, fratrum exornata. Francofurti, MDXCVIII.)

(FIGURE 1.--SIMIAE MAGNATUM DELICIAE.--De Bry, 1598.)

The first edition of that most amusing old book, 'Purchas his Pilgrimage,' was published in 1613, and therein are to be found many references to the statements of one whom Purchas terms "Andrew Battell (my neere neighbour, dwelling at Leigh in Essex) who served under Manuel Silvera Perera, Governor under the King of Spaine, at his city of Saint Paul, and with him went farre into the countrey of Angola"; and again, "my friend, Andrew Battle, who lived in the kingdom of Congo many yeares," and who, "upon some quarell betwixt the Portugals (among whom he was a sergeant of a band) and him, lived eight or nine moneths in the woodes." From this weather-beaten old soldier, Purchas was amazed to hear "of a kinde of Great Apes, if they might so bee termed, of the height of a man, but twice as bigge in feature of their limmes, with strength proportionable, hairie all over, otherwise altogether like men and women in their whole bodily shape.* They lived on such wilde fruits as the trees and woods yielded, and in the night time lodged on the trees." ([Footnote] *"Except this that their legges had no calves."--[Ed. 1626.] And in a marginal note, "These great apes are called Pongo's.")

This extract is, however, less detailed and clear in its statements than a passage in the third chapter of the second part of another work--'Purchas his Pilgrimes,' published in 1625, by the same author--which has been often, though hardly ever quite rightly, cited. The chapter is entitled, "The strange adventures of Andrew Battell, of Leigh in Essex, sent by the Portugals prisoner to Angola, who lived there and in the adjoining regions neere eighteene yeeres." And the sixth section of this chapter is headed--"Of the Provinces of Bongo, Calongo, Mayombe, Manikesocke, Motimbas: of the Ape Monster Pongo, their hunting: Idolatries; and divers other observations."

"This province (Calongo) toward the east bordereth upon Bongo, and toward the north upon Mayombe, which is nineteen leagues from Longo along the coast.

"This province of Mayombe is all woods and groves, so over-growne that a man may travaile twentie days in the shadow without any sunne or heat. Here is no kind of corne nor graine, so that the people liveth onely upon plantanes and roots of sundrie sorts, very good; and nuts; nor any kinde of tame cattell, nor hens.

"But they have great store of elephant's flesh, which they greatly esteeme, and many kinds of wild beasts; and great store of fish. Here is a great sandy bay, two leagues to the northward of Cape Negro,* which is the port of Mayombe. ([Footnote] *Purchas' note.--Cape Negro is in 16 degrees south of the line.) Sometimes the Portugals lade logwood in this bay. Here is a great river, called Banna: in the winter it hath no barre, because the generall winds cause a great sea. But when the sunne hath his south declination, then a boat may goe in; for then it is smooth because of the raine. This river is very great, and hath many ilands and people dwelling in them. The woods are so covered with baboones, monkies, apes and parrots, that it will feare any man to travaile in them alone. Here are also two kinds of monsters, which are common in these woods, and very dangerous.

"The greatest of these two monsters is called Pongo in their language, and the lesser is called Engeco. This Pongo is in all proportion like a man; but that he is more like a giant in stature than a man; for he is very tall, and hath a man's face, hollow-eyed, with long haire upon his browes. His face and eares are without haire, and his hands also. His bodie is full of haire, but not very thicke; and it is of a dunnish colour.

"He differeth not from a man but in his legs; for they have no calfe. Hee goeth alwaies upon his legs, and carrieth his hands clasped in the nape of his necke when he goeth upon the ground. They sleepe in the trees, and build shelters for the raine. They feed upon fruit that they find in the woods, and upon nuts, for they eate no kind of flesh. They cannot speake, and have no understanding more than a beast. The people of the countrie, when they travaile in the woods make fires where they sleepe in the night; and in the morning when they are gone, the Pongoes will come and sit about the fire till it goeth out; for they have no understanding to lay the wood together. They goe many together and kill many negroes that travaile in the woods. Many times they fall upon the elephants which come to feed where they be, and so beate them with their clubbed fists, and pieces of wood, that they will runne roaring away from them. Those Pongoes are never taken alive because they are so strong, that ten men cannot hold one of them; but yet they take many of their young ones with poisoned arrowes.

"The young Pongo hangeth on his mother's belly with his hands fast clasped about her, so that when the countrie people kill any of the females they take the young one, which hangeth fast upon his mother.

"When they die among themselves, they cover the dead with great heaps of boughs and wood, which is commonly found in the forest."* ([Footnote] *Purchas' marginal note, p. 982:--"The Pongo a giant ape. He told me in conference with him, that one of these pongoes tooke a negro boy of his which lived a moneth with them. For they hurt not those which they surprise at unawares, except they look on them; which he avoyded. He said their highth was like a man's, but their bignesse twice as great. I saw the negro boy. What the other monster should be he hath forgotten to relate; and these papers came to my hand since his death, which, otherwise, in my often conferences, I might have learned. Perhaps he meaneth the Pigmy Pongo killers mentioned.")

It does not appear difficult to identify the exact region of which Battell speaks. Longo is doubtless the name of the place usually spelled Loango on our maps. Mayombe still lies some nineteen leagues northward from Loango, along the coast; and Cilongo or Kilonga, Manikesocke, and Motimbas are yet registered by geographers. The Cape Negro of Battell, however, cannot be the modern Cape Negro in 16 degrees S., since Loango itself is in 4 degrees S. latitude. On the other hand, the "great river called Banna" corresponds very well with the "Camma" and "Fernand Vas," of modern geographers, which form a great delta on this part of the African coast.

Now this "Camma" country is situated about a degree and a-half south of the Equator, while a few miles to the north of the line lies the Gaboon, and a degree or so north of that, the Money River--both well known to modern naturalists as localities where the largest of man-like Apes has been obtained. Moreover, at the present day, the word Engeco, or N'schego, is applied by the natives of these regions to the smaller of the two great Apes which inhabit them; so that there can be no rational doubt that Andrew Battell spoke of that which he knew of his own knowledge, or, at any rate, by immediate report from the natives of Western Africa. The "Engeco," however, is that "other monster" whose nature Battell "forgot to relate," while the name "Pongo"--applied to the animal whose characters and habits are so fully and carefully described--seems to have died out, at least in its primitive form and signification. Indeed, there is evidence that not only in Battell's time, but up to a very recent date, it was used in a totally different sense from that in which he employs it.

For example, the second chapter of Purchas' work, which I have just quoted, contains "A Description and Historicall Declaration of the Golden Kingdom of Guinea, etc. etc. Translated from the Dutch, and compared also with the Latin," wherein it is stated (p. 986) that--"The River Gaboon lyeth about fifteen miles northward from Rio de Angra, and eight miles northward from Cape de Lope Gonsalves (Cape Lopez), and is right under the Equinoctial line, about fifteene miles from St. Thomas, and is a great land, well and easily to be knowne. At the mouth of the river there lieth a sand, three or foure fathoms deepe, whereon it beateth mightily with the streame which runneth out of the river into the sea. This river, in the mouth thereof, is at least four miles broad; but when you are about the Iland called 'Pongo', it is not above two miles broad...On both sides the river there standeth many trees...The Iland called 'Pongo', which hath a monstrous high hill."

(FIGURE 2.--"Homo Sylvestris. Orang Outang." The Orang of Tulpius, 1641.)

The French naval officers, whose letters are appended to the late M. Isidore Geoff. Saint Hilaire's excellent essay on the Gorilla,* ([Footnote] *'Archives du Museum', tome x.) note in similar terms the width of the Gaboon, the trees that line its banks down to the water's edge, and the strong current that sets out of it. They describe two islands in its estuary;--one low, called Perroquet; the other high, presenting three conical hills, called Coniquet; and one of them, M. Franquet, expressly states that, formerly, the Chief of Coniquet was called '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 Medicae', published in 1641, the 56th chapter or section is devoted to what he calls 'Satyrus indicus', "called by the Indians Orang-autang or Man-of-the-Woods, and by the Africans Quoias Morrou." He gives a very good figure, evidently from the life, of the specimen of this animal, "nostra memoria ex Angola delatum," presented to Frederick Henry Prince of Orange. Tulpius says it was as big as a child of three years old, and as stout as one of six years: and that its back was covered with black hair. It is plainly a young Chimpanzee.

In the meanwhile, the existence of other, Asiatic, man-like Apes became known, but at first in a very mythical fashion. Thus Bontius (1658) gives an altogether fabulous and ridiculous account and figure of an animal which he calls "Orang-outang"; and though he says "vidi Ego cujus effigiem hic exhibeo," the said effigies (see Figure 6 for Hoppius' copy of it) is nothing but a very hairy woman of rather comely aspect, and with proportions and feet wholly human. The judicious English anatomist, Tyson, was justified in saying of this description by Bontius, "I confess I do mistrust the whole representation."

It is to the last mentioned writer, and his coadjutor Cowper, that we owe the first account of a man-like ape which has any pretensions to scientific accuracy and completeness. The treatise entitled, "'Orang-outang, sive Homo Sylvestris'; or the Anatomy of a Pygmie compared with that of a 'Monkey', an 'Ape', and a 'Man'," published by the Royal Society in 1699, is, indeed, a work of remarkable merit, and has, in some respects, served as a model to subsequent inquirers. This "Pygmie," Tyson tells us "was brought from Angola, in Africa; but was first taken a great deal higher up the country"; its hair "was of a coal-black colour and strait," and "when it went as a quadruped on all four, 'twas awkwardly; not placing the palm of the hand flat to the ground, but it walk'd upon its knuckles, as I observed it to do when weak and had not strength enough to support its body."--"From the top of the head to the heel of the foot, in a strait line, it measured twenty-six inches."

(FIGURES 3 AND 4.--The 'Pygmie' reduced from Tyson's figures 1 and 2, 1699.)

These characters, even without Tyson's good figures (Figs. 3 and 4), would have been sufficient to prove his "Pygmie" to be a young Chimpanzee. But the opportunity of examining the skeleton of the very animal Tyson anatomised having most unexpectedly presented itself to me, I am able to bear independent testimony to its being a veritable 'Troglodytes niger',* though still very young. Although fully appreciating the resemblances between his Pygmie and Man, Tyson by no means overlooked the differences between the two, and he concludes his memoir by summing up first, the points in which "the Ourang-outang or Pygmie more resembled a Man than Apes and Monkeys do," under forty-seven distinct heads; and then giving, in thirty-four similar brief paragraphs, the respects in which "the Ourang-outang or Pygmie differ'd from a Man and resembled more the Ape and Monkey kind."

([Footnote] * I am indebted to Dr. Wright, of Cheltenham, whose paleontological labours are so well known, for bringing this interesting relic to my knowledge. Tyson's granddaughter, it appears, married Dr. Allardyce, a physician of repute in Cheltenham, and brought, as part of her dowry, the skeleton of the 'Pygmie.' Dr. Allardyce presented it to the Cheltenham Museum, and, through the good offices of my friend Dr. Wright, the authorities of the Museum have permitted me to borrow, what is, perhaps its most remarkable ornament.

After a careful survey of the literature of the subject extant in his time, our author arrives at the conclusion that his "Pygmie" is identical neither with the Orangs of Tulpius and Bontius, nor with the Quoias Morrou of Dapper (or rather of Tulpius), the Barris of d'Arcos, nor with the Pongo of Battell; but that it is a species of ape probably identical with the Pygmies of the Ancients, and, says Tyson, though it "does so much resemble a 'Man' in many of its parts, more than any of the ape kind, or any other 'animal' in the world, that I know of: yet by no means do I look upon it as the product of a 'mixt' generation--'tis a 'Brute-Animal sui generis', and a particular 'species of Ape'."