the human; he has no tail, and walks erect. The skin of his body is black, and slightly covered with hair.' That this description really applies not to apes, but to the dark-skinned, non-Aryan aborigines of the land, appears further in the enumeration of the local dialects of Hindustan, to which, it is said, 'may be added the jargon of the bunmanus, or wild men of the woods.'[1] In the islands of the Indian Archipelago, whose tropical forests swarm both with high apes and low savages, the confusion between the two in the minds of the half-civilized inhabitants becomes almost inextricable. There is a well-known Hindu fable in the Hitopadesa, which relates as a warning to stupid imitators the fate of the ape who imitated the carpenter, and was caught in the cleft when he pulled out the wedge; this fable has come to be told in Sumatra as a real story of one of the indigenous savages of the island.[2] It is to rude forest-men that the Malays habitually give the name of orang-utan, i.e., 'man of the woods.' But in Borneo this term is applied to the miyas ape, whence we have learnt to call this creature the orang-utan, and the Malays themselves are known to give the name in one and the same district to both the savage and the ape.[3] This term 'man of the woods' extends far beyond Hindu and Malay limits. The Siamese talk of the khon pa, 'men of the wood,' meaning apes;[4] the Brazilians of cauiari, or 'wood-men,' meaning a certain savage tribe.[5] The name of the Bosjesman, so amusingly mispronounced by Englishmen, as though it were some outlandish native word, is merely the Dutch equivalent for Bush-man, 'man of the woods or bush.'[6] In our own language the
- ↑ Ayeen Akbaree, trans, by Gladwin; 'Report of Ethnological Committee Jubbulpore Exhibition, 1866-7,' part i. p. 3. See the mention of the banmanush in 'Kumaon and Nepal,' Campbell; 'Ethnology of India,' in 'Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,' 1866, part ii. p. 46.
- ↑ Marsden, 'Sumatra,' p. 41.
- ↑ Logan in 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. i. p. 246; vol. iii. p. 490; Thomson, ibid. vol. i. p. 350; Crawfurd, ibid. vol. iv. p. 186.
- ↑ Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. i. p. 123; vol. iii. p. 435.
- ↑ Martius, 'Ethnog. Amer.' vol. i. pp. 425, 471.
- ↑ Its analogue is bosjesbok, 'bush-goat,' the African antelope. The deri-
