In the great order of the Primates, after man, stand the man-shaped or anthropomorphous[3] Apes, the Great Tail-less. They are inhabitants of equatorial Africa, and of the large Asiatic islands and the adjacent mainland, and first and foremost amongst them is THE GORILLA. Africa, to the south of the Great Desert, has always been a country of wonders, and highly attractive to imaginative and restless men; and its dark population, so ignorant and superstitious, has, from its love of the marvellous, shadowed the truth with much mystery. Hence, travellers in those tropical regions, which are so fatal to Europeans, have from the earliest times told of the man-like creatures they had heard of and sometimes seen; and they have associated them in the equatorial part of the continent with human dwarfs, pigmies, and monsters. For centuries these degraded human races have been sought after, and now whilst it is admitted that dwarfed men exist, it has come to light that most of the stories which led to the belief in their hideous associates were derived from the existence of large man-like Apes--creatures of dread to the natives--whose traditions are full of credulous anecdotes about them. Hidden in the recesses of vast forests, where the silence of nature is intense, and moving with great activity, where men can hardly follow, these animals acquired most doubtful reputations, and their ugly personal appearance, so suggestive of violence, was magnified in every way in the eyes of the timid natives. [Illustration: 1. FOOT AND HAND OF A MONKEY. 2. A. CATARHINE MONKEY. 3. A. PLATYRHINE MONKEY. 4. MONKEY WITH CHEEK POUCHES.] So dreaded were the Apes, and so environed were they with a superstitious mystery, that Europeans had travelled and traded close to their haunts for centuries before one of them was seen by any other eyes than those of the timid negroes. Many stories about them had long been told, and indeed some of them are as old as the days of the Carthaginians. For instance, Hanno, a Carthaginian, was ordered to sail on a voyage of discovery round Africa some centuries before Christ, the exact date not being fixed; and he sailed and rowed in his galleys out of the present Strait of Gibraltar, and coasted southwards until he came to the great bay, probably somewhere about the Gaboon River, near the equator, in Western Africa. It is stated in the history of his voyage:--