Man's Place in Nature, and Other Essays. Thomas Henry Huxley
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this animal, and his careful description of it, entitled “Beschrijving van der Groote Borneosche Orang-outang of de Oost-Indische Pongo,” is contained in the same volume of the Batavian Society’s Transactions. After Von Wurmb had drawn up his description he states, in a letter dated Batavia, Feb. 18, 1781,[11] that the specimen was sent to Europe in brandy to be placed in the collection of the Prince of Orange; “unfortunately,” he continues, “we hear that the ship has been wrecked.” Von Wurmb died in the course of the year 1781, the letter in which this passage occurs being the last he wrote; but in his posthumous papers, published in the fourth part of the Transactions of the Batavian Society, there is a brief description, with measurements, of a female Pongo four feet high.
Did either of these original specimens, on which Von Wurmb’s descriptions are based, ever reach Europe? It is commonly supposed that they did; but I doubt the fact. For, appended to the memoir “De l’Ourang-outang,” in the collected edition of Camper’s works, tome i., pp. 64–66, is a note by Camper himself, referring to Von Wurmb’s papers, and continuing thus:—“Heretofore, this kind of ape had never been known in Europe. Radermacher has had the kindness to send me the skull of one of these animals, which measured fifty-three inches, or four feet five inches, in height. I have sent some sketches of it to M. Soemmering at Mayence, which are better calculated, however, to give an idea of the form than of the real size of the parts.”
These sketches have been reproduced by Fischer and by Lucæ, and bear date 1783, Soemmering having received them in 1784. Had either of Von Wurmb’s specimens reached Holland, they would hardly have been unknown at this time to Camper, who, however, goes on to say:—“It appears that since this, some more of these monsters have been captured, for an entire skeleton, very badly set up, which had been sent to the Museum of the Prince of Orange, and which I saw only on the 27th of June, 1784, was more than four feet high. I examined this skeleton again on the 19th December, 1785, after it had been excellently put to rights by the ingenious Onymus.”
It appears evident, then, that this skeleton, which is doubtless that which has always gone by the name of Wurmb’s Pongo, is not that of the animal described by him, though unquestionably similar in all essential points.
Camper proceeds to note some of the most important features of this skeleton; promises to describe it in detail by-and-bye; and is evidently in doubt as to the relation of this great “Pongo” to his “petit Orang.”
The promised further investigations were never carried out; and so it happened that the Pongo of Von Wurmb took its place by the side of the Chimpanzee, Gibbon, and Orang as a fourth and colossal species of man-like Ape. And indeed nothing could look much less like the Chimpanzees or the Orangs, then known, than the Pongo; for all the specimens of Chimpanzee and Orang which had been observed were small of stature, singularly human in aspect, gentle and docile; while Wurmb’s Pongo was a monster almost twice their size, of vast strength and fierceness, and very brutal in expression; its great projecting muzzle, armed with strong teeth, being further disfigured by the outgrowth of the cheeks into fleshy lobes.
Eventually, in accordance with the usual marauding habits of the Revolutionary armies, the “Pongo” skeleton was carried away from Holland into France, and notices of it, expressly intended to demonstrate its entire distinctness from the Orang and its affinity with the baboons, were given, in 1798, by Geoffroy St. Hilaire and Cuvier.
Even in Cuvier’s “Tableau Elementaire,” and in the first edition of his great work, the “Regne Animal,” the “Pongo” is classed as a species of Baboon. However, so early as 1818, it appears that Cuvier saw reason to alter this opinion, and to adopt the view suggested several years before by Blumenbach,[12] and after him by Tilesius, that the Bornean Pongo is simply an adult Orang. In 1824, Rudolphi demonstrated, by the condition of the dentition, more fully and completely than had been done by his predecessors, that the Orangs described up to that time were all young animals, and that the skull and teeth of the adult would probably be such as those seen in the Pongo of Wurmb. In the second edition of the “Regne Animal” (1829), Cuvier infers, from the “proportions of all the parts” and “the arrangements of the foramina and sutures of the head,” that the Pongo is the adult of the Orang-Utan, “at least of a very closely allied species,” and this conclusion was eventually placed beyond all doubt by Professor Owen’s Memoir published in the “Zoological Transactions” for 1835, and by Temminck in his “Monographies de Mammalogie.” Temminck’s memoir is remarkable for the completeness of the evidence which it affords as to the modification which the form of the Orang undergoes according to age and sex. Tiedemann first published an account of the brain of the young Orang, while Sandifort, Müller and Schlegel, described the muscles and the viscera of the adult, and gave the earliest detailed and trustworthy history of the habits of the great Indian Ape in a state of nature; and as important additions have been made by later observers, we are at this moment better acquainted with the adult of the Orang-Utan, than with that of any of the other greater man-like Apes.
It is certainly the Pongo of Wurmb;[13] and it is as certainly not the Pongo of Battell, seeing that the Orang-Utan is entirely confined to the great Asiatic islands of Borneo and Sumatra.
And while the progress of discovery thus cleared up the history of the Orang, it also became established that the only other man-like Apes in the eastern world were the various species of Gibbon—Apes of smaller stature, and therefore attracting less attention than the Orangs, though they are spread over a much wider range of country, and are hence more accessible to observation.
Although the geographical area inhabited by the “Pongo” and “Engeco” of Battell is so much nearer to Europe than that in which the Orang and Gibbon are found, our acquaintance with the African Apes has been of slower growth; indeed, it is only within the last few years that the truthful story of the old English adventurer has been rendered fully intelligible. It was not until 1835 that the skeleton of the adult Chimpanzee became known, by the publication of Professor Owen’s above-mentioned very excellent memoir “On the osteology of the Chimpanzee and Orang,” in the Zoological Transactions—a memoir which, by the accuracy of its descriptions, the carefulness of its comparisons, and the excellence of its figures, made an epoch in the history of our knowledge of the bony framework, not only of the Chimpanzee, but of all the anthropoid Apes.
By the investigations herein detailed, it became evident that the old Chimpanzee acquired a size and aspect as different from those of the young known to Tyson, to Buffon, and to Traill, as those of the old Orang from the young Orang; and the subsequent very important researches of Messrs. Savage and Wyman, the American missionary and anatomist, have not only confirmed this conclusion, but have added many new details.[14]
One of the most interesting among the many valuable discoveries made by Dr. Thomas Savage is the fact, that the natives in the Gaboon country at the present day, apply to the Chimpanzee a name—“Enché-eko”—which is obviously identical with the “Engeko” of Battell; a discovery which has been confirmed by all later inquirers. Battell’s “lesser monster,” being thus proved to be a veritable existence, of course a strong presumption arose that his “greater monster,” the “Pongo,” would sooner or later be discovered. And, indeed, a modern traveller, Bowdich, had, in 1819, found strong evidence, among the natives, of the existence of a second great Ape, called the “Ingena,” “five feet high, and four across the shoulders,” the builder of a rude house, on the outside of which it slept.
In 1847, Dr. Savage had the good fortune to make another and most important addition to our knowledge of the man-like Apes; for, being unexpectedly detained at the Gaboon river, he saw in the house of the Rev. Mr. Wilson, a missionary resident there, “a skull represented by the natives to be a monkey-like animal, remarkable