And now the long intervals between travellers' accounts wax
shorter. The well-known writer, Bowdich, before quoted,
published, in 1819, his hearsay description of the "Ingena,"
garnished with the usual native tales. I had the honour of
receiving an account of his discovery from his widow, the late
Mrs. Lee, who was held the "mother of African travellers," and
whose energy and intelligence endured to the last,--if memory
serves me, she referred to some paper upon the subject, written
by herself about 1825. Towards the end of 1846, the Rev. Mr.
Wilson, founder of the Gaboon Mission, and proto-grammarian of
its language, obtained two skulls, which were followed by
skeletons, fragmentary and perfect. He sent No. 1, measuring,
when alive, 5 1/2 feet in height, and 4 feet across the shoulders,
to the "Natural History Society" of Boston. He evidently has a
right to boast that he was "the first to call the attention of
naturalists to the 'Njena.'" His colleague, Dr. Thomas Savage,
and Professor Jeffries Wyman called the new animal by the old
name of gorilla, suffixing it to the "Troglodytes" which Geoffrey
de Saint-Hilaire, reviving Linnaeus, had proposed in 1812.
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