MAMMALOGY. 



Without adverting to the fabulous relations of the " half human 

 beings" of those authors who lived in the darker ages, it should be 



perfectly distinct and resembling those of man ; nor is this peculiar to the 

 Baboon* tribe, the whole race of Linnaean Simiae have the same bones, and 

 indeed all animals that have occasion to extend their arms or anterior feet; 

 it is by their assistance that monkeys are enabled to grasp with their fore 

 arms and ascend the branches of trees, and seize with so much adroitness 

 the fruits with their hands ; and it is by means of these bones that bats 

 are enabled to maintain the due motion of their wings in the act of flying. 

 There are many quadrupeds in which the clavicles appear only under pecu- 

 liar modifications, and more or less attached by means of the muscles to 

 the skeleton, but none in which some such provision of nature is wholly 

 wanting, except those who use the anterior part only to assist their direct 

 progressive motion, of which the camel, the goat, the sheep, ox, and horse 

 are prominent examples. 



Of the limbs we see only the arms, the lower extremities being en- 

 veloped, as before observed, in its piscivorous covering, or more probably 

 removed altogether. There is nothing peculiar in the form of the arms or 

 hands to authorize an assimilation with those of the human race ; they are 

 those of the Rufous Orang-Outang ; they are longer according to the pro- 

 portions we may conceive of the entire animal than in the human frame, 

 rather longer than the Black Orang-Outang, and shorter than in the next 

 succeeding species of the Linnaean Simiae, the Hylobates of Illiger ; and 

 beyond these it would be superfluous for various reasons to extend compa- 

 risons f. 



As to the "breasts,^' which we are told " are large and resemble those 

 of a woman, and which, though now small and shrivelled, yet must have 

 been full and prominent when the animal was living,^' we may also be per- 

 mitted to say a few words. The comparison, it must be allowed, affords no 

 very handsome compliment to the fair sex ; much pains appears to have 

 been taken to distend and enlarge the skin ; the mammae or teats of the breast 

 are composition, and it would not be difiicult to say that the same ingre- 



* Papio Brisson, Cynocephalus, Illiger, &c. 



t In man, as we have elsewhere shown, the hand, when the body stands erect, 

 reaches down to about the middle of the thigh ; in the Black Orang-Outang so as to 

 cover the knee-pan, in the Rufous Orang-Outang the ends of the fingers nearly 

 touch the heel ; they are still rather longer than the last in Simla Lar and its con- 

 geries, the Hylobates of Illiger, 



