Title: Seventeenth Century Science Bleeding into Literature through the
Body of the Chimpanzee

Proposal: There is a tension between Anglo-American culture and the
chimpanzee.  It comes from a shared but tenuous border of identification
and projection, a border that has, from their first shared encounter,
been tested and contested in text.  Definitions of what makes humans
human are continually readjusted, and what "human" signifies easily
broadens, at times crossing species lines.

In 1699, Dr. Edward Tyson first introduced "Natural Experimental
Philosophy", and, with it, the English language, to the pygmy
chimpanzee, or bonobo.  His medium was a scientific treatise,
Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris: or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared
with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man.  By claiming the bonobo was
more like a human than what was then considered an ape, in both anatomy
and behavior, Tyson established a sort of proto-primatology.  Doing so
required painstakingly refuting, line by line, the taxonomies of
Aristotle, Galen, and other ancient logicians.  Tyson's foundation was
one that privileged method - repeatable, arguable experimentation and
observation that self-consciously created potentially impermanent
conclusions - over immutable authority. Tyson's break would inspire John
Arbuthnot's parody of the weight afforded the works of the ancients in,
"An Essay of the Learned Martinus Scriblerus, Concerning the Origine of
Sciences".

At the same time, Tyson used his Orang-Outang in conjunction with that
book's companion piece, A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies, the
Cynocephali, the Satyrs and Sphinges of the Ancients to demythologize
"wild men" in literature.  This second volume allowed the member of the
Royal Society to extend his study and influence from nascent science to
the popularly familiar realm of ancient literature.

This study shows how science's precursors struggled to establish
themselves in text as they carved out distinct, discursive spaces within
the context of their contemporary culture.  Tyson's seminal work with
chimpanzees also provides an interesting view into the nature of human
boundaries, both in their creation and erasure, through the mechanisms
of an emerging science and institution of modernity.