I.


Edward Tyson, the author of the Essay with which this book is concerned,
was, on the authority of Monk's Roll of the Royal College of Physicians,
born, according to some accounts, at Bristol, according to others, at
Clevedon, co. Somerset, but was descended from a family which had long
settled in Cumberland. He was educated at Magdalene Hall, Oxford, as a
member of which he proceeded Bachelor of Arts on the 8th of February 1670,
and Master of Arts on the 4th of November 1673. His degree of Doctor of
Medicine he took at Cambridge in 1678 as a member of Corpus Christi
College. Dr. Tyson was admitted a candidate of the College of Physicians
on the 30th of September 1680, and a Fellow in April 1683. He was Censor
of the College in 1694, and held the appointments of Physician to the
Hospitals of Bridewell and Bethlem, and of Anatomical Reader at Surgeons'
Hall. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and contributed several papers
to the "Philosophical Transactions." Besides a number of anatomical works,
he published in 1699 "A Philosophical Essay concerning the Rhymes of the
Ancients," and in the same year the work by which his name is still known,
in which the Philological Essay which is here reprinted finds a place.
Tyson died on the 1st of August 1708, in the fifty-eighth year of his age,
and is buried at St. Dionis Backchurch. He was the original of the Carus
not very flatteringly described in Garth's "Dispensary."

The title-page of the work above alluded to runs as follows:--

_Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris_:

OR, THE ANATOMY OF A PYGMIE