Analogous Apes

Abstract

From the dissection table of a London physician to the tropical forests of Borneo and Sumatra, this chapter places the reader amidst the bestiary of Classical animals populating seventeenth-century scientific responses to the problem of the anthropoid ape. The anatomical puzzle of a strangely man-like creature recently arrived to British shores from the Congo inadvertently reveals the influence of Classical figurations in early-modern European conceptions of the human and animal. Guided by ‘indigenous’ idioms and simian similitude, a perplexed comparative anatomist resorts to Classical philology and the authority of Homer to posit a new non-human anthropoid species also known to the ancients.