3i8 NATURAL SCIENCE. November, 



Ligaments and Joints. — Very little attention has been given to 

 the ligamentous or articular structures of the orang. Fick (235) gives 

 many details concerning the articulations ; Aeby (88) and Thomson 

 (204) of the ankle joint and foot ; Hartmann (39) of the hip joint, 

 while Keith (250) gives a description of many of the ligamentous 

 structures. 



The Skull. — In the examination of a large collection of orang 

 skulls, such as is available in London through the courtesy of the 

 curators of the leading museums (British Museum (Natural History), 

 Royal College of Surgeons, and Royal College of Science), including 

 over eighty skulls, one is struck by the amount of variation they 

 exhibit. This great diversity of form is due, for the most part, to 

 the fact that at no time of life does the orang's skull cease from 

 growing and changing, altering nearly as much in old age as in youth ; 

 but it is also due to the fact that there is a great amount of individual 

 variation. It is owing, in a lesser degree, to the fact that skulls are 

 impressed to a variable extent with sexual characters. It is 

 commonly quite easy to tell the skull of an adult female from that of a 

 male, but at times this is hardly possible, the skull of the female 

 having assumed characters commonly found in the male or vice versa. 

 It is worthy of remark, however, that skulls coming from the same 

 locality have a striking similarity of form, even to the minutest 

 features. These observations will help to explain the vast literature 

 that has arisen around the skull of the orang. The wide fluctuation 

 in form and size was thought to be due to there being several species 

 of orang, and an immense amount of labour was expended upon skulls 

 to discover the cranial characters of each species by Blyth (224), 

 Briihl (227), Fitzinger (236), Temminck (280), Schlegel and Miiller 

 (272), Giglioli (31), Lucae (252a), Wagner (285a), and many others. 

 There can be no doubt that the crania in the Natural History 

 Museum at South Kensington, assigned by Owen (262) and Wallace 

 (284) to Simia morio, are the skulls of scarcely mature individuals, and 

 all the characters assigned to them as specific are those which dis- 

 tinguish the skulls of young from fully adult animals. Lucas (253), on 

 the other hand, concluded that the cranial characters of Simia 

 imivmbii, Fischer, were simply marks of old age, a conclusion with which 

 I agree. What is really wanted at present more than aught else is a 

 thorough examination of a wide series of skulls, perhaps three hundred 

 might be sufficient, including all ages, and a final determination of the 

 characters due to age and sex changes and those due really to 

 ndividual irregularity. Selenka (277) appears to possess ample 

 material for such an enterprise, but as yet he has only published a 

 very brief review of his collection. Age changes so far have been 

 noted by Dumortier (232, 233), Heusinger (246), Mayer (257), 

 Temminck (280), and Lucas (253), who had at his disposal the large 

 collection brought home by Hornaday (247) from Borneo. The 

 generic characters, which distinguish the skull of the orang from that 



