The French naval officers, whose letters are appended to the late M. Isidore Geoff. Saint Hilaire's excellent essay on the Gorilla,[5] 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. [Illustration: _Homo Sylvestris. Orang Outang._ FIG. 2.--The Orang of Tulpius, 1641.] 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 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 Angolâ 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 Fig. 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."