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Tyson's Orang-Outang, Sive Homo Sylvestris and Swift's Gulliver's Travels

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

M. F. Ashley Montagu
M. F. Ashley Montagu*
Affiliation:
Hahnemann Medical College, Philadelphia
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Extract

Among the probable sources upon which Swift drew for his Gulliver's Travels, there is one work which has been completely overlooked. This is Edward Tyson's book Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris, published under the imprimatur of the Royal Society at London in May or June, 1699. This work consists of two parts, the first dealing with the anatomy of a juvenile chimpanzee, the second with the knowledge of the apes and monkeys possessed by the ancients and their interpretation of it.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , March 1944 , pp. 84 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1944

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References

Note 1 in page 84 For a study of Tyson and his work see M. F. Ashley Montagu, Edward Tyson, 1650–1708, And the Rise of Human and Comparative Anatomy in England (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, xx, 1943), pp. xxix+488.

Note 2 in page 84 T. H. Huxley, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (London, 1863), p. 8.

Note 3 in page 85 See Samuel Garth, The Dispensary, in which Tyson is referred to as Carus (the cognomen of Lucretius). Garth's poem was published in late June, 1699, a few weeks after the appearance of Tyson's book, though it had been in circulation in manuscript for some months before.

Sir Richard Blackmore, The Lay-Monastery (London, 1714), pp. 27–34.

John Arbuthnot, see pp. 86–89 of the present paper.

Note 4 in page 85 William A. Eddy, Gulliver's Travels: A Critical Study (Princeton University Press, 1923), pp. 81–82. Dr. Eddy gives a brief but quite erroneous account of this Essay, based, apparently, on a reprint of it separately issued by the late Professor B. C. A. Windle in 1894, A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients (London, David Nutt, 1894). Had Dr. Eddy been familiar with Tyson's original volume it is a likely conjecture that there would have been no necessity for the present paper.

Note 5 in page 86 See Swift's letter to Arbuthnot in George A. Aitken, The Life and Works of John Arbutknot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), p. 66.

Note 6 in page 86 For an excellent contemporary account of Woodward's personality and mannerisms see London in 1710: From the Travels of Zacharias Conrad von U ffenbach (Translated and edited by W. H. Quarrell and Margaret Ware), London, Faber and Faber, 1934, pp. 172–173, 176–177.

Note 7 in page 86 Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, etc., pp. 167–168, p. 126, p. 152.

Note 8 in page 88 Is it possible that upon reading this sentence a thought occurred to Swift: “Yes, but supposing a European fell into the hands of the Oran Outangs. What then?” I do not suggest that Swift ever experienced such a thought; I merely suggest thé possibility.

Note 9 in page 88 This idea was delightfully exploited, via Monboddo, by Thomas Love Peacock in his novel Melincourt (1817), in which the hero is “a mute philosopher, Oran-Outang.“

Note 10 in page 88 “An Essay of the Learned Martinus Scriblerus, etc.,” in Alexander Pope, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (London, 1732), m. Aitken, op. cit., p. 366.

Note 11 in page 88 Footnote no. 3 in the original Essay gives the full reference to Tyson's book.

Note 12 in page 89 Now generally printed as chapter xiii of the Memoirs.

Note 13 in page 89 The date as printed was “17° Dei Maij, 1699.“

Note 14 in page 89 Tyson, op. cit., p. 52.

Note 15 in page 89 Gulliver's Travels, edited by Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1941), pp. 213–214.