Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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But If There Exist A Monkey Of A Large Size In The New
Continent, How Has It Happened That For Three Centuries No Man Worthy
Of Belief Has Been Able To Procure The Skin Of One?
Several hypotheses
present themselves to the mind, in order to explain the source of so
ancient an error or belief.
Has the famous capuchin monkey of
Esmeralda (Simia chiropotes), with its long canine teeth, and
physiognomy much more like man's* (* The whole of the features - the
expression of the physiognomy; but not the forehead.) than that of the
orang-otang, given rise to the fable of the salvaje? It is not so
large indeed as the coaita (Simia paniscus); but when seen at the top
of a tree, and the head only visible, it might easily be taken for a
human being. It may be also (and this opinion appears to me the most
probable) that the man of the woods was one of those large bears, the
footsteps of which resemble those of a man, and which are believed in
every country to attack women. The animal killed in my time at the
foot of the mountains of Merida, and sent, by the name of salvaje, to
Colonel Ungaro, the governor of the province of Varinas, was in fact a
bear with black and smooth fur. Our fellow-traveller, Don Nicolas
Soto, had examined it closely. Did the strange idea of a plantigrade
animal, the toes of which are placed as if it walked backward, take
its origin from the habit of the real savages of the woods, the
Indians of the weakest and most timid tribes, of deceiving their
enemies, when they enter a forest, or cross a sandy shore, by covering
the traces of their feet with sand, or walking backward?
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