were obtained from the people, who never differed in their description of the creature they called the Soko, and insisted that it was only a monkey. The skulls, at any rate, have been proved to be human, and the teeth are some of them human, too; but if the tough skin, thickly set with close gray hair came off the body of a man or a woman, he or she must have been of a species hitherto unknown to science. For as yet no family of our race has confessed to a soft gray fur, nearly an inch long in parts and inclining to white at the tips. Yet such is the skin of the Soko, the creature whose skull Professor Huxley says is human.
Two fascinating theories at once suggest themselves to help us out of the Soko mystery; for, premising that Mr. Stanley and Professor Huxley are both right, — and it is very difficult to see how either can be wrong, — it may happen that under either theory the thing described by the tribes along the Livingstone River as “a fruit-stealing ape, five feet in height, and walking erect with a staff in its left hand, may prove to be human. The first is that the tribes who eat the Soko are really cannibals, and that they know it, but feeling that curious shame on this point which is common to nearly all cannibals, they will not confess to the horrid practice, and prefer, when on their company manners with uneatable strangers, to pass off their human victims as apes. The other is that there actually does exist in the centre of the Dark Continent a race of forest men so degraded and brute-like that even the cannibals living on the outskirts of their jungles really think them to be something less than human, and as such hunt them and eat them. Either theory suffices to supply the missing link, for if it be true that the skulls of the Soko are human skulls — and that the Soko
