xi] SKINNING "MAYAS TJ APING" 



say, masked ; and it is certainly less human than that of the Mayas 

 Kassa. The flat circular face of the Mayas Tj aping is very much 

 like that of the moon as given in popular almanacks. The eyes 

 are on a level with the skin, somewhat like those of a Chinese, 

 small, and with a chestnut-brown iris, while the very small amount 

 of sclerotic which is exposed at the corners of the eye is very dark 

 in colour. 



The singular shape of the face of the Mayas Tj aping 1 is 

 due to the expansions of the cheeks, caused by an accumulation of 

 fat just over the masseter muscles in front of the ears, which are 

 thus hidden from view when the animal is looked at from in front. 

 These expansions are compressed and laminar, about an inch and a 

 half thick, and not rounded as they are reproduced in badly mounted 

 museum specimens. The skin over them is tense and smooth. 

 Except as regard their position, they may be compared to the pro- 

 tuberances on the face of Sus verrucosus, or to the hump on the 

 back of Indian cattle. The colour of the naked portions of the face 

 is nearly black, or, rather, blackish olive. The body is covered 

 with very long hair of a deep fulvous red. 



The skin was very thick and tough, and the operation of taking 

 it off extremely arduous and unpleasant, for I had to work on the 

 ground without proper tools, tormented all the time by ants, flies, 

 horse-flies, and mosquitoes, not to mention the excessive heat and 

 the unpleasant emanations. A Chinaman and my Dyak boy Pagni 

 helped me pretty well to get off the fat and clean the skin, and 

 afterwards to take the flesh off the bones. 



Whilst I was thus hard at work another Mayas Kassa was 

 brought in, but it had been so badly mauled that neither the skin nor 

 the skeleton were worth preserving, even had I had time to attend 

 to it. It was pregnant, I learnt, but unfortunately the foetus 

 had been taken out and thrown away with the viscera. I 

 had put the skin of the already mentioned baby orang-utan 

 with a broken arm into spirits, for the huge Mayas Tj aping took 

 up all my time ; in fact, I worked at its preparation all that day, 

 all the next, and part of the third. I was obliged to incise longi- 

 tudinally each of the fingers and toes to clean them thoroughly ; 

 even the terminal phalanges were taken out, so that both 

 skin and skeleton should be complete. 2 I dressed the bones 



1 Tj aping, in Malay, is the term, applied to a small, nearly triangular or 

 heart-shaped piece of silver which is hung in front of baby girls as a fig-leaf, 

 and is, in the early years of their lives, the only bit of clothing they wear. Flat, 

 triangular, hemihedric diamonds are called Intang tjaping because they; 

 have the same shape as the silver Tjaping ; and for the same reason, I believe, 

 the term has been applied to the broad-faced orang-utan. 



2 This specimen, perhaps one of the best in existence, is in the Museo 

 Civico at Genoa. 



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