We are to have a visit very shortly, it seems,
from the fascinating young gorilla who has stirred so much interest in Berlin, and who is exciting even a greater furore there than our first hippopotamus excited in London. The British Medical Journal says that his "grave courtesy "' his "childlike good-nature and docility," the "grace and propriety" of his manner in shaking bands and in drinking wine, has quite won the hearts of the Berliners, who cannot bear to spare him to us even for two or three months. His "solemn courtesies" are asserted to be " almost more than anthropomorphic," which means, we suppose, that they are rather more than human than less than human. He is called Pongo, and his cousin, a very lively chimpanzee named Tschego (who often drinks wine and water with Pongo,—Pongo gravely tilting the glass to enable Tschego to get at it more easily),—is to accompany him. This tilting of the glass is not a trick, but a practice due to Pongo'e natural politeness. In short, the correspondent of the Medical Journal anticipates for Pongo a great English success,. and almost pleads that he may be allowed to go into society, like the late Mr. Peacock's " Sir Oran Hant-ton," who was elected (in the novel) a member of the unreformed parliament for the borough of One-vote. We trust England may not be found far deficient in hospitality to Pongo and Tschego, who, if Mr. Darwin is right, should be received with a certain veneration, as the first adequate representatives of our ancestors, in an age long anterior to the first stone age, and in gentleness and graciousness it would seem superior to most of us as we now are.
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