Notes on the Mias. 
3 47 
VII. NOTES ON THE MIAS. 
By W. de Crespigny, of Sarawak. 
AILED men are even to this day occasionally men- 
tioned in your Journal and considered to be (if found) 
a missing link between men and monkeys, the fa 6t 
being lost sight of that the ape is a link between those two 
animals, and that the link sought should have no tail.* 
While upon the subject of apes a few remarks on the 
mias (pr. maias), or orang utan, may be permitted. During 
my twenty-six years of life in the Malay Archipelago I have 
had many opportunities of studying them, although I have 
met with only one species. They live in the forest, among 
the branches of the trees, and very seldom come to earth. 
I have never seen one on earth alive and free, and believe 
they only come down when progress aloft is impracticable, 
owing to the distance between the branches of neighbouring 
trees happening to be too great ; and this in the forests of 
Borneo is very seldom the case, for the trees grow as close 
as Nature will allow them to. They live on fruit. They 
form families of male, female, and infant ; and I have seen 
not only one infant, but also that of the previous year in- 
cluded in the group. They make nests in the fork of the 
tree, or in the fork of a branch of it, of transverse pieces of 
stick, but they do not thatch them, as some suppose, although 
they do bestrew the interior with leaves. The female and 
infant sleep in this nest, the male higher up. The nests are 
occupied only for a few days ; that is, until the fruit in the 
immediate neighbourhood is consumed, when they move on. 
The arms of the orang utan (men of the forest, if both 
words are considered as substantives ; wild men, if utan is 
used as an adjedtive, which it seldom is) being very much 
longer than its legs, it trusts mostly to them for its powers 
of locomotion ; and I need scarcely add to what has gone 
before that the piCbure of a maias (or its skeleton) as repre- 
sented in the Natural History portion of the “ English 
Cyclopaedia,” where the animal is represented to be walking 
upright on its feet, with the aid of a staff in its hand, is mis- 
leading. I have read that once when a maias was killed, 
* We have repeatedly pointed out that the anthropoid apes are as tailless as 
man. The instances of tailed human beings we regard merely as reversions. 
—Ed. 
2 A i 
