MAMMALOGY. 



they are termed, are the very authors who have confounded as the 

 same species the two animals so dissimilar to each other as the rufous 

 and the Black Orang-Outangs, or as sometimes called the Chim- 

 panzee.* 



Professor Gmelin in his edition of the Linnsean writings has 

 endeavoured, but ineffectually, to distinguish the two last-mentioned 

 animals, at the same time that he rejects the Linnasan Homo Trog- 

 lodytes as fabulous, and conceiving it must have originated in an 

 exaggerated detail of the rufous Orang-Outang has reduced it as a 

 synonym to that species. This being in direct contradiction to the 

 latest conclusion of Linnaeus, it may not be amiss to observe that in 

 this very correction Gmelin has totally lost sight of his original, and 

 with it we are as well persuaded the accuracy of that original. Thus 

 Gmelin makes this Homo Troglodytes of Linnaeus the rufous Orang- 

 Outang, without observing that Linnaeus tells us after Bontius that 

 his animal is white instead of rufous, and that it is clothed with 

 whitish curled or wavy white down, except on the face, hands, and 

 feet, which are bare, and the hair of the head, which is longer and 

 disposed' in curls, as on the human head. This cannot be in any 

 manner reconciled with the rufous Orang-Outang, and if it could 



* In the general Zoology of Dr. Shaw, the difficulty of discriminating 

 the two species is overcome by forming an English specific character, in 

 which the description of both is amalgamated ; and the general history that 

 accompanies his description presents us with a curious melange of the 

 manners of both, as ingeniously interwoven together. The nomenclature 

 of the singular object thus compounded is no less extraordinary, for its author 

 apparently vaccillating in opinion as to which of the two Linnaean names 

 ought with most propriety to be assigned to it, has appropriated both : he 

 names it specifically Homo Troglodytes and Simia Satyrus, thus constituting 

 of the same being a man and a monkey ! Vide Gen, Zool, vol. I, p. 3^ 



