OF THE MAN-LIKE APES 209 



and Buffon between them, however, did a good deal more 

 disfigurement to Battell's sober account than ' cutting off 

 an article/ Thus BatteU's statement that the Pongos 

 " cannot speake, and have no understanding more than a 

 beast," is rendered by Buffon " qu'il ne peut parler quoi- 

 qu'il ait plus d'entendement que les aatres animaux " ; and 

 again, Purchas' affirmation, " He told me in conference 

 with him, that one of these Pongos tooke a negro boy of 

 his which lived a moneth with them," stands in the French 

 version, " un pongo lui enleva un petit negre qui passa un 

 an entier dans la societe de ces animaux." 



After quoting the account of the great Pongo, Buffon 

 justly remarks, that all the ' Jockos ' and ' Orangs ' hitherto 

 brought to Europe were young ; and he suggests that, in 

 their adult condition, they might be as big as the Pongo 

 or ' great Orang ' ; so that> provisionally, he regarded the 

 Jockos, Orangs, and Pongos as all of one species. And 

 perhaps this was as much as the state of knowledge at the 

 time warranted. But how it came about that Buffon failed 

 to perceive the similarity of Smith's ' Mandrill ' to his own 

 ' Jocko,' and confounded the former with so totally differ- 

 ent a creature as the blue-faced Baboon, is not so easily 

 intelligible. 



Twenty years later Buffon changed his opinion,* and 

 expressed his belief that the Orangs constituted a genus 

 with two species, a large one, the Pongo of Battell, and 

 a small one, the Jocko : that the small one (Jocko) is the 

 East Indian Orang ; and that the young animals from 

 Africa, observed by himself and Tulpius, are simply young 

 Pongos. 



In the meanwhile, the Dutch naturalist, Vosmaer, gave, 

 in 1778, a very good account and figure of a young Orang, 

 brought alive to Holland, and his countryman, the famous 

 anatomist, Peter Camper, published (1779) an essay on the 

 Orang-Utan of similar value to that of Tyson on the Chim- 

 panzee. He dissected several females and a male, all of 

 which, from the state of their skeleton and their dentition, 

 he justly supposes to have been young. However, judging 

 by the analogy of man, he concludes that they could not 

 have exceeded four feet in height in the adult condition. 

 Furthermore, he is very clear as to the specific distinctness 

 of the true East Indian Orang. 



" The Orang," says he, " differs not only from the Pigmy 

 * Histoire Naturelle, Suppl. tome 76me, 1789. 



