...A preemptive strike in the debate over development
Richard Owen,
"On the Anthropoid Apes,"
Report of the British Association, 33 (1854), part 2: 111-113.

The distinguished anatomist and palaeontologist Richard Owen, who had contributed to Darwin's Zoology of the Beagle, emerged during the 1850s as one of the leading opponents of secular biology. In 1849, a missionary oddly named Savage first reported the existence of a new primate, the gorilla, and Owen, seeing a potential threat to the distinctiveness of humans, obtained specimen gorilla skulls. By the mid-1850s, Wombwell's Menagerie was touring Britain with a live gorilla on display. In this address to the largely-amateur British Association, Owen took up a firm anti-Lamarckian stance, with no space for ideas of species transmutation. He subsequently asserted that the distinctiveness of humanity lay in a single portion of the brain, the hippocampus minor. While Owen would later become the butt of brutal attacks by the Darwinians, especially Huxley, his intransigence in the 1850s warned the still-cautious Darwin about the risks of discussing human evolution until his general theory was established.

Thomas Staughton Savage (1804-1880), Jeffries Wyman (1814-1874)

The American Thomas S. Savage was a protestant clergyman, missionary, physician and naturalist. In 1833 he received the degree of M. D. at Yale Medical School and then studied at a theological seminary. He was sent as a missionary to Liberia in 1836. While working in Africa, he showed great interest for the fauna of this continent.
When he finally went on his way back to America in 1847, he was detained in Gaboon. There he noticed the skull of a large great ape which belonged to the clergiman J. L. Wilson. Savage was able to acquire several more skulls and some bones from this, until then, unknown species. They were referred to as 'Engé-ena' by the local people, and he described them together with Jeffries Wyman with the scientific name Troglodytes gorilla. The species name 'gorilla' they adopted from the report of the Carthaginian seafarer Hanno (470 b. Chr.). He had called by this name hairy 'savage people' he had found on the western coast of Africa.
Savage wrote about these animals in his publication:
They are exceedingly ferocious, and always offensive in their habits, never running from man as does the Chimpanzée... The killing of an Engé-ena is considered an act of great skill and courage, and brings to the victor signal honor... They are generally eaten, and their flesh, with that of the Chimpanzée, and monkeys at large, occupies a prominent place in their 'bill of fare'...
The skull of the Engé-ena recedes much farther from the human type than that of the Enché-eco, in its greater development of the cranial crests and ridges, in the greater elongation of the upper jaw downwards and forwards, in the length of the bony palate, no less than in the much more brutal and ferocious expression of the face; in this last respect it even surpassses the Orangs of Borneo and Sumatra.
In addition, Savage studied African reptiles and insects. After returning to the USA, he continued to serve his church.
Jeffries Wyman, likewise an American, practiced medicine for three years in Boston after completing his medical studies at Harvard. He subsequently worked as a scientist at several institutions. In 1847 he became professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard. In the following years, he founded a museum of anatomy. He became professor of American archeology and ethnology in 1866, and founded a museum of ethnology. His most famous anatomical studies include those of the gorilla, in particular the first decription of this species.

...Sarkis Atamian's book--The Origin of Tarzan : The Mystery of Tarzan's Creation Solved--Publication Consultants; ISBN: 1888125128; (December 1998)--suggested Du Chaillu's African books might be the source for Edgar Rice Burroughs' inspiration of the famous ape-man: Tarzan of the Apes....