28 Professor Owen on the [Feb. 9, 



like expression of features. It was brought from Borneo or Sumatra ; 

 where it is known by the name of Orang, which, in the language 

 of the natives of Borneo, signifies " man," with the distinctive 

 addition of Outan^ meaning " Wood-man," or " Wild Man of the 

 Woods." This creature differed from the pigmy, or Simla Tro- 

 glodytes of Africa, by being covered with hair of a reddish-brown 

 colour, and by having the anterior, or upper limbs, much longer in 

 proportion, and the thumb upon the hind feet somewhat less. It 

 was entered in the zoological catalogue as the Simla Satyrus. A 

 governor of Batavia, Baron Wurmb, had transmitted to Holland, 

 in 1780, the skeleton of a large kind of ape, tailless, like this small 

 species from Borneo, but with a much-developed face, and large 

 canine teeth, and bearing thick callosities upon the cheeks, giving 

 it, upon the whole, a very baboon-like physiognomy ; and he called 

 it the Pongo. 



At the time when Cuvier revised his summary of our knowledge 

 of the animal kingdom, in his second edition of the Regne Ardmal, 

 1 829, the knowledge of the anthropoid apes was limited to these 

 three forms. It had been suspected that the pongo might be the 

 adult form of the orang; but Cuvier, pointing to its distinctive 

 character, suggested that it could hardly be the same species. The 

 facial angle of the small red orang of Borneo, and of the small 

 black chimpanzee of Africa, brought them, from the predominant 

 cranium, and small size of the jaws and small teeth, nearer than 

 any other known mammalian animal to the human species, par- 

 ticularly to the lower, or negro forms. It was evident, from the 

 examination of these small chimpanzees and orangs, that they were 

 the immature of some large species of ape. The small size and 

 number of their teeth, (there being in some of the smaller specimens, 

 only twenty, like the number of deciduous teeth in the human 

 species,) and the intervals between those teeth, all showed them to 

 be of the first or deciduous series. Professor Owen had availed 

 himself of the rich materials in regard to these animals collected 

 about that time by the Zoological Society, to investigate the state of 

 dentition, and the state of the teeth— the permanent teeth — that might 

 be hidden in the substance of the jaws, of both the immature orang- 

 outang and the chimpanzee, and had found, that the germs of those 

 teeth in the orang-outang agreed in size with the permanent teeth 

 that were developed in the jaws of a species of pongo of Wurmb, 

 which Sir Stamford Raffles had presented to the museum of the Col- 

 lege of Surgeons some years before. Specimens of orangs since ac- 

 quired, of an intermediate age, have shown the progressive change 

 of the dentition. The skull of one of these was exhibited, showing 

 the huge anterior incisors co-existing with the small milk canines. 



In the substance of the jaw are found the germs of the great 

 canines, germs of large bicuspid teeth, showing the changes that 

 must take place when the jaw is sufficiently enlarged to receive per- 

 manent teeth of this kind ; and when the rest of the cranium is 



