The cage was a 7-foot steel cube that weighed more than 500 pounds. It consisted of 24 panels bolted together, each measuring 42 inches square and composed of wire woven into a matrix of diamond-shaped lattices.

    The animal in the cage was not native to this spot in the African jungle, less than 2 degrees below the equator. During the months he remained locked inside, he attracted the attention of locals who often gathered and observed him, raised their voices at him and listened to the peculiar sounds that rose from the cage and spread in the warm springtime air.

    They probably had never seen anything like him. He wore linen clothes and a pith helmet, or sometimes a business suit, and he himself had built this prison and brought it with him from America. Though cramped, it was furnished with a couch and a camp chair and battery-powered lights.

    The caged man's name was Richard Garner and he was a teacher and businessman born 45 years earlier, far from the French Congo, in the Virginia town of Abingdon. His audience, the locals, were apes, 23 by his count, and even more closely than they were watching him, he was studying them, listening to them and trying to understand them.

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    The son of a prosperous manufacturer, Garner was born in 1848 and educated at the Jefferson Institute in Tennessee. He reportedly ran away from home at 16 to join the Confederate army but was captured and imprisoned after a few months.

    At the close of the Civil War, he migrated to Williamsburg, Ky., where he finished his education and, for 14 years, taught high school. He drifted into real estate and other ventures but, in the 1880s, began to concentrate on an entirely different enterprise: researching the language and habits of anthropoid apes.

    Within the available facts about his life, there is no easy segue to explain Garner's sudden enthusiasm. A profile written after his death claims that he'd become convinced as a young boy that animals had a language of their own, but Garner's first documented expression of such a theory as an adult came after a visit to the Zoological Gardens in Cincinnati.

    There, while observing a caged baboon and several chimpanzees, he was struck by the way their cries changed depending on the circumstance.

    He returned to the zoo again and again and became convinced that their sounds were speech, that they had a means of communicating with one another and that sounds made by animals were rudimentary words or language.

    Eventually, Garner began to work directly with apes and chimpanzees, drawing on his experience as a teacher. Hoping to gauge their abilities to learn and differentiate, he was allowed into their cages to conduct basic experiments involving numerals, letters, colors and shapes. One of his accounts of his experiments reveals a weary compassion for his captive subjects:

    "They are usually in a better mood in the morning than in the latter part of the day. This is especially true with apes and monkeys, as one might expect them to be in a bad state of mind after all the peanut fiends have poked sticks at them all day and spit in their cute little faces until they are tired of resenting it."

    But Garner was pleased with the conclusions of his studies and began to try to form with letters some of the sounds made by chimps and apes, sounds he felt were understood by them to illustrate definite concepts or at least categories of ideas, usually involving anger, fear, pleasure or discomfort.

    "The gamut a monkey has is limited," Garner said in an 1891 interview. "The expressions he uses, indicative of his wants or emotions, are but few."

    However basic his translations, he became more and more convinced that the sounds had to stand for something and his experiments continued.

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    "Here is a man from Virginia, some 44 years old, who with infinite pains and patience is working backwards in another direction, one never attempted," Barnet Phillips wrote, the same year, in a Harper's Weekly article on Garner.

    "In archaeology a splinter of flint represents the first tool primitive man may have used. Farther back than [that], Mr. Garner is looking for the first understood syllable."

    And as Garner attempted to understand and articulate the sounds his subjects made, a breakthrough arrived from another realm of science.

    "At last came the Edison phonograph," Garner told Phillips. "I was being shipwrecked when this wonderful machine saved me. I made use of it at once. What I do now is to receive the sounds monkeys make on a cylinder. I analyze them all."

    He soon found another use for the device. He recorded what he believed to be "hunger cries" from a group of monkeys at the Central Park zoo. These recordings were then played for a second group of chimps while Phillips watched.

    "The cylinders were turned before the newcomers with the hunger cry," Phillips wrote. "And at once all the strangers understood it and began to beg in their turn, making all the sounds and gestures of famine."

    A year later, in The New York Times, Garner wrote, "From my very slight acquaintance with the anthropoid apes, I am not prepared to say whether they would ever be able to utter any complex sounds of human speech or not. I frankly admit, however, that I do not think such a thing possible among them.

    "But it is an easy matter to impart to others an idea that has once been applied to practical use... Hence the simians may be much improved by their contact with man, and many instances prove that they do acquire new ideas and become somewhat more elevated in a state of captivity than in a wild state."

    By that point, however, Garner had already made the decision to leave behind working within a state of captivity, at least as far as his subjects were concerned. Before the end of 1892, he set off for West Africa, where he hoped to meet the apes on their own ground.

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    By April 1893, Prof. Garner had established a camp, which he dubbed "Fort Gorilla," not far from the Ogawai River.

    He locked himself within the relative safety of his cage and observed the apes as they wandered past or gathered around him. Patent rights had forced him to leave behind his phonograph ("the avarice of a few men makes science hide her head in shame, while they strangle her babes and cut off her posterity," he complained) but he was there, free to experience the lives of his subjects from his strange, turnabout zoo.

    Exactly how much time he spent in the jungle is not known; accounts vary, but all fall between 100 and 115 days.

    While there, Garner wrote the basis for the book "Speech of Monkeys" and during that time he distinguished what he believed were approximately 100 individual sounds made by the animals; of those, he claimed to interpret about 30. Within the book, he theorized that different species of monkeys make sounds not understood by other species; that their speech does not enable monkeys to carry on connected conversations; and that their sounds are usually limited to a single sign or remark which is replied to in the same manner.

    With his experiments completed, Garner emerged from the jungle later that year and headed for Europe with his notes and manuscript and two new specimens he'd collected: a pair of chimpanzees that he named Aaron and Elishaba.

    In December 1893, however, during a stay with Liverpool naturalist William Cross, Elishaba fell ill. According to a New York Times article that year, the British climate proved too much for her and she soon died of "a pulmonary affection , brought on by chill."

    "Professor Garner was present during the last moments of the chimpanzee," wrote the Times. "And when he put his hand to her heart to see if it had ceased to beat, Aaron put his hand there, too, looking up into the professor's eyes as if inquiring if that was all they could do for her.

    "When Professor Garner visited his protege yesterday, a state of gloom still surrounded [Aaron's] cage, and poor Aaron was not consoled until he had his hand in that of the professor, and by signs and sound was telling him of his distress."

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    The focus on Garner becomes hazier after his first return from Africa.

    He wrote two more books, "Gorillas and Chimpanzees" in 1896, and "Apes and Monkeys," in 1900, and he traveled and lectured around the world, even occasionally passing through the Roanoke Valley, where his sister, Kate Hickman, lived, and where his great-niece, Marilyn Humphries, still resides. An 1894 article in The Roanoke Times quipped, "Strange it may seem that the professor should have had to seek in Africa's wilds specimens of a tribe of 'inevolved' beings when we have about us so many whose apish manners and actions could evidently have absorbed his attention."

    It is not known how many more expeditions he made. Some sources say he made three more, others imply there were at least a dozen before his last recorded trip, a 31-month trek through Africa that was funded by the Smithsonian Institute and concluded in 1916.

    During that trip, Garner tracked what he'd heard was a "speaking ape," one of several that reportedly communicated with natives. As Garner attempted to capture the animal, which stood more than 6 feet tall and weighed 200 pounds, he called to it in what he believed was its language. According to a 1919 article in The New York Times, the animal replied and bounded toward him so aggressively that, threatened, Garner shot and killed it. With that ape died his last chance for a documentable breakthrough.

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    In 1920, as he prepared for another trip to Africa, Garner was staying in Chattanooga when he was hospitalized with what was then known as Bright's disease, a kidney ailment now identified as nephritis, and died after several days. He was 72 years old.

    His death made headlines, but that was one of the last times Garner would be widely discussed. His theories and experiments are today only intermittently recognized and, even during his life, they were the subject of controversy and debate.

    An uncredited item in the May 13, 1896, issue of the London Truth, titled "Garner's Mythical Exploits," cast doubts on both his work and his character.

    "I learn that my old friend 'Professor' Garner (who I am sorry to see is still regarded in American papers as having made some discoveries about the language of monkeys) is coming out in a new line as the organizer of a ... tour in West Africa and the Congo State. The excursion is to visit Gaboon (sic), and apparently go very close to the scene of Garner's mythical exploits in his cage.

    "This will be good news to the worthy French missionaries who may now perhaps be able to get out of Garner the little matter of 20 pounds which he owes them for his board and lodging during his '101 days alone in the jungle.'"

    And a New York Times article, in 1919, noted that Charles Aschemier, a Baltimore professor who had just returned from Africa with a Smithsonian Institute expedition, claimed credit over Garner for finding "speaking ape" and said that neither Garner nor anybody else had made progress in communicating with the mysterious creatures.

    "The natives of the jungle, only a little removed in intelligence from the apes, are unable to hold conversation with them," Aschemier said.

    Perhaps most disheartening of all for Garner was a controversy that arose later that year when the commercial photography firm Underwood & Underwood published in newspapers a photograph of a Garner look-alike (identified in a caption as Garner) kissing a monkey who was chained to a chair.

    Garner sued Underwood & Underwood for $100,000 in damages but he died just as the case was going to trial. The lawsuit was dismissed and, because no representative of Garner's estate appeared in court to explain his whereabouts, a judgment for $108 was entered against him.

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    During the past decade, Garner's name has resurfaced here and there. Though his name yields little information when Googled, it still makes periodic, unlikely appearances in scientific journals.

    "His appreciation of individual variability, especially in the personality of apes, was antithetical to the typological thinking of his time," wrote H.S. Robert Glaser in "Garner's Contributions on African Apes Reassessed," an article in Brown University's 1993 laboratory primate newsletter. "Garner has been dismissed historically because of his ill-conceived venture of observing apes in Gabon from inside a cage, with questionable results.

    "This and his unorthodox background and style may account for his failure to be recognized for pioneering contributions which have generally been credited to later workers." And, indeed, British paleontologist Louis Leakey's influential work with Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey resulted from experiments similar to Garner's.

    In "Machiavellian Monkeys & Shakespearean Apes: The Question of Primate Language," a 1995 essay written for the National Zoo, Alex Hawes called "Speech of Monkeys," "a book that was decades ahead of its time in investigating the vocalizations, as well as the general cognitive abilities, of monkeys."

    And as recently as 2000, Garner's theories reappeared for further evaluation in a paper presented by Gregory Radick, a professor at the University of Cambridge.

    Whatever the end result of his work turns out to be, he was a scientist of fierce conviction, devoted to the study of apes and language and, like most professors of unconventional theories, had both supporters and detractors.

    "What is called the missing link ... may never be located," he wrote in 1910. "I do know from my quarter of a century's study of apes that they have a sense of government, a sense of propriety, dignity, family life, justice, and that they talk."

   - News researcher Belinda Harris contributed to this report.