Intelligence and Miscellaneous Articles. 73 



noticed by Camper, in seven out of eight Orangs observed by him, 

 viz. its possessing no ungueal phalanx, and consequently no nail, 

 loses much of its importance as a specific character from the fact 

 that the individual dissected at the Society's Museum a few years 

 since had very perfect, but small, black nails, and two phalanges, 

 and that the same number of phalanges exist in the natural skeleton 

 of Lord Amherst's Orang in the Museum of the College of Sur- 

 geons." (Lond. and Edinb. Phil. Mag. vol. vi. p. 466 — 467). 



During my search for the references which Mr.Owen had requested, 

 I found that, from a comparison of the various statements then extant 

 respecting the absence or presence of the nail of the hallux in spe- 

 cimens of the Orang, 1 had arrived, in 1828, at the conclusion, that its 

 deficiency was not connected wiih any distinction of species among 

 the more anthropoid Simite. As this particular subject has again 

 been brought under the attention of zoologists by Mr. Owen's in- 

 quiries, it seems proper now to make public, as follows, the remarks 

 upon it which J originally drew up, exactly as they were prepared 

 for insertion in the Memoir of Sir Stamford Raffles. They were in- 

 tended, I may add, to form a note, to be attached to a synopsis of 

 the additions to Zoology contained in Sir Stamford's " Descriptive 

 Catalogue of a Zoological Collection made in the Island of Sumatra 

 and its vicinity," which was published, in 1821, in the Transactions 

 of the Linnean Society. 



" Sir Stamford states, when describing the Sumatran Simi<e,[mthe 

 Catalogue just referred to, Trans. Linn. Soc, vol. xiii. p. 241,] that 

 in a living specimen of the Orang Outang, Simia Satyrus, Linn., sent 

 from Borneo to the Menagerie at Calcutta in 1819, the nail of the 

 thumb was wanting on the * hind-feet.' The present imperfect 

 and confused state of the information possessed by naturalists re- 

 specting the animal or animals to which the names of Orang Outang 

 and Pongo have been applied, renders it interesting to note this 

 circumstance, since the specimen sent to Calcutta has, no doubt, 

 been preserved for future examination. Camper and Linnaeus, it 

 will be remembered, regarded this deficiency of the thumb-nails in 

 the hinder hands as a general character of the Orang Outangs, the 

 truth of which statement, however, has been denied by Cuvier, 

 (Regne Animal, tome i. [edit. 1817] p. 103 [edit. 1829, p. 88])." 



" In an article on the Orang Outang of Borneo, by Mr. J. Grant, 

 just published [July, 1828] in No. xvii. of the Edinburgh Journal of 

 Science, we are informed that the great toes (hinder thumbs) of the 

 Sumatran animal so called, described by the late Dr. Abel, have 

 well-defined nails, resembling in shape and size those on the other 

 * toes' (hinder fingers). In the Pongo or Orang Outang of Borneo 

 described by Wurmb, as appears from the same article, * the nails 

 of the great toes' were much smaller and shorter than the rest. In 

 the hinder hands of an Orang Outang, brought from Borneo a few 

 years since, which are deposited in the collection of the Trinity- 

 House, Hull, and have lately been described by Dr. Harwood, * the 

 thumbs are each destitute of a nail, but they have a hardened pro- 

 tuberance in its place.' (See Trans. Linn. Soc, vol. xv. p. 472). 



Third Series. Vol. 7. No. 37. July 1835. L 



