VII MONKEYS— AFFINITIES AND DISTRIBUTION 159 



this way, and they generally were able to travel through 

 the forest overhead as quickly as I could run along under- 

 neath, looking up frequently to keep them in sight. 

 Once I saw one build a nest. I had wounded him 

 severely and expected he would drop to the ground, but 

 he got up as high as he could into the tree, and choosing 

 a forked branch he stretched out his arms, broke off or 

 cracked the smaller branches and laid them across the 

 fork, and in a short time had made a platform which 

 completely hid him from below. The next day he was 

 still there but dead, as could be seen by the cloud of flies 

 above him. He was a very fine large male, and I ob- 

 tained the bones some time afterwards by paying a dollar 

 to two Malays who climbed the tree, and tying the dried 

 skin with a long cord let it down to the ground. It has 

 often been stated that the orang when pursued or 

 attacked breaks off dead branches or fruit and throws 

 them at its pursuers, while other observers have denied 

 that it ever does so. I have, however, seen it do so 

 myself more than once, the creatures being evidently 

 enraged, making a curious grunting noise and throwing 

 down dead sticks, and on one occasion the spiny fruit of 

 the durian, in great quantities.^ 



The illustration (Fig. 29, next page) represents with 

 considerable accuracy a full-grown male Orang-utan, 

 showing the curious dilated face formed by a ridge of the 

 skin on each side, giving a broad flat surface varying from 

 ten to thirteen and a half inches wide in different in- 

 dividuals. This peculiar character is found in no other 

 ape. The differences between the orang and the gorilla 

 are well shown by comparing the two figures, the former 

 having much longer arms, longer hands and feet, and 

 weaker thumbs, all characters which are in accordance 

 with its more arboreal habits. An interesting peculiarity 

 common to the three great apes — the orang utan, gorilla, 

 and chimpanzee, but not found in any other ape or 

 monkey, is the arrangement of the hair of the arms, 

 which grows in opposite directions from the shoulder and 



1 For fuller details see my Malay Archipelago^ Chap. IV., and the 

 late Professor Huxley's Man's Place in Nature, pp. 31 — 42. 



