8 
"WARD’S NATURAL SCIENCE BULLETIN. 
From the Boston Commercial Bulletin. 
The Missing Link. 
He roamed the forest free, 
With a proud untrammelled air, 
He built a nest on the palm tree’s crest, 
And dwelt a master there. 
The monarch of all the earth, 
The lord of wood and plain, 
The lion fled when his angry tread 
Shook the earth with proud disdain. 
He dined on elephant, did 
This cy-no-ceph-a-lus, 
And rhinoceros, and the river horse 
And the hip-po-pot-am-us. 
Brawny of limb was he, • 
Yet supple and agile, 
On rock or tree his arms were free, 
For his toes were prehensile. 
Y et doth the monarch sigh 
As he paces up and down, 
And soliloquize with downcast eyes 
And a highly regal frown. 
Sad is the royal heart, 
Wounded the royal pride, 
For the lords of state say the king shall mate 
With a NsMego Mbouve bride. 
“ What ! marry a subject ! I 
Espouse a chimpanzee ! 
No, I’m not a Guelph if I know myself, 
No mes alliance for me ! 
Perish my royal blood. 
Perish the princely line, 
Ere I desecrate with a vulgar mate, 
This lineage of mine.” 
The monarch paused, transfixed. 
Vanished his growing- wrath, 
And a bright surprise beamed in his eyes 
As he gazed down the forest path. 
A vision of beauty, such 
As by Simian eye, before 
Had never been seen in the woodland green, 
Or been known to Simian lore. 
A maiden young and fair 
As the charcoal’s ebon tint. 
With teeth as white as cowries bright 
From the Royal Congo mint. 
Her locks of a crispy curl, 
Her feet of a mammoth size, 
All made her seem a bewitching dream 
To the fond gorilla’s eyes. 
To a high o’er-arching limb 
He swung by his sinewy arms, 
And dangling there, ’twixt earth and air, 
Gazed on her dusky charms. 
“ Now by my kingly troth 
This maid shall be, I think, 
My royal bride, and supply beside 
Mr. Darwin’s missing link.” 
The thoughtless ebon maid, 
Suspicionless of guile, 
To the tree trunk strayed and beneath its shade, 
Tarried in thought awhile. 
Then the monarch spake his love 
As he swung by the lofty limb , 
He was gifted, they say, with a taking way, 
For the lady smiled on him. 
He pats her curly locks, 
With his great prehensile toes 
Entwined in her wool— a vigorous pull— 
A shriek— and up she goes ! 
Thus was the monarch wed, 
And thus the race begaife 
Whence, thro’ various links, somewhat strange, 
methinks 
Came the “ Descent of Man !” 
The “divine law of compensation” is well illus- 
trated by the fact that while we have just sent 
some fine specimens of our Antelope and Rocky 
Mountain Goat to Switzerland, we are awaiting 
the arrival of some skins of the Mouflon or Wild 
Sheep of Corsica which are now on the way. It 
is almost wonderful that the Mouflon has not been 
exterminated in Sardinia and Corsica, and noth- 
ing but the very mountainous character of these 
islands preserves the animal from extinction. 
The Group of Orangs in the Central Park 
Museum. 
(From Harper’s Weekly, Dec. 18, 1880.) 
The specimens composing the group repre- 
sented in our illustration, were shot on the Sadong 
River, Borneo, by Mr. William T. PIornaday, 
who was sent to the East Indies by Professor 
Henry A. Ward, of Rochester, to collect speci- 
mens for his Natural History Establishment. 
He visited Borneo in 1878, and in a paper read 
by him last year before the American Associa- 
tion for the Advancement of Science, at Sara- 
toga, we find an interesting account of his experi- 
ence in hunting the orang, and many new facts 
relating to the habits of the animal. 
#**■*■** 
The American Museum of Natural History, in 
this city, has just come into possession of a strik- 
ing group of orang-outangs, which was purchased 
of Professor Ward, and presented to the Museum 
by Robert Colgate, Esq., of this city. The 
specimens composing it were mounted by Mr. 
Hornaday, who has devoted several months of 
patient labor, in Professor Ward’s establishment, 
in reproducing in a life-like form these wonderful 
animals, which fell to his rifle in Borneo. The 
specimens were mounted from careful drawings 
and measurements of the freshly killed animals, 
and as a piece of artistic taxidermy this group is 
probably unsurpassed in the country. 
The group represented by our illustration is 
intended to show the surroundings and habits of 
the orang-outang as well as the animals them- 
selves. It is composed of five specimens, viz., 
two old males, one old and one young female, 
and a baby, all of the specimens known to science 
as the Simia Wurvibii. The central and most 
striking figure is a very large old male orang, 
with wide cheek callosities and very long hair, 
who is hanging by one hand and foot to a stout 
tree, and reaching stealthily out and down with 
his right hand to snatch a large durion from the 
foot of the old female who hangs to a tree on the 
left. She is quietly eating of a durion she holds 
in her free hand, quite unsuspicious of the 
stealthy attack being made from behind. Behind 
this female, high up in a small tree, is her baby, 
looking very much like a huge fat spider, hang- 
ing in precisely the position he had assumed 
when discovered in the forest. On the right of 
the group in the foreground is a young female 
orang lying on her back fast asleep, upon a nest 
she has just built of green boughs broken off and 
piled crosswise in the top of a small sapling. 
Although fast asleep, she grasps the nearest large 
limbs as naturally as the feet of a sleeping bird 
grasp its perch. This is an exact reproduction 
of the nest constructed by the orang-outang. Be- 
hind the “ sleeping beauty,” perched upon a large 
horizontal branch, sits another large male orang, 
eating another durion, while he watches the 
stealthy movement going on below. The entire 
group is to be regarded as a section cut out of the 
top of a Bornean forest, with animals, leafy trees, 
and all. 
Mr. Hornaday informs us in the paper men- 
tioned above that the orang is very seldom known 
to descend to the earth, and that upon the ground 
he is a picture of almost abject helplessness. 
Even in his native tree-tops he is neither graceful 
nor active in his movements. His body is very 
heavy, and owing to the disproportionate short- 
ness of his legs, his progress depends mostly upon 
his long, sinewy arms. Very often he goes 
swinging through a tree-top or beneath a hori- 
zontal branch by their aid alone, often reaching 
six feet at a stretch. When passing from one 
tree to another, he reaches out and gathers in his 
grasp a number of small branches that he feels 
sure will sustain his weight, then swings himself 
across. The orang never dares to leap from 
branch to branch or from tree to tree, as the 
monkeys do so fearlessly, but when feeding he 
can hang to a limb by one hand for a great length 
of time. 
Although a full-grown male orang, with his 
powerful arms and hands, his formidable canine 
teeth and darkly scowling face, is an object that 
never fails to inspire a timid person with dread, 
and cause every other visitor to exclaim, “ Well, 
I would not like to meet him alone in the woods,” 
your orang is, after all, perfectly harmless and 
inoffensive so long as he is let alone. He was 
never known to attack man unless absolutely 
brought to bay, and even when attacked and 
wounded he only exerts himself to the utmost to 
run away or hide himself. Nothing could be 
farther from the mind of an orang than the idea 
of coming down from his tree-top to club his pur- 
suers. There is no authentic account of one of 
the animals using a club. If the orang is wound- 
ed, or brought to bay in any way, then he will 
fight desperately, and with his powerful teeth in- 
flict very ugly wounds. 
The two male specimens in this group possess 
the wonderful cheek callosities peculiar to all 
the males of this species, the form and dimen- 
sions of which have been reproduced with care. 
This hard, gristly expansion of the cheeks is a 
peculiar sexual characteristic or ornament (?), 
since it serves no useful purpose, and is not con- 
trolled by voluntary muscles. The largest male 
measures thirteen inches across the face— the 
maximum width. From head to heel his vertical 
height is four feet three inches, or one inch taller 
than any previously recorded by naturalists, 
while its weight was 140 pounds. The hair 
where it is longest measures twelve or fourteen 
inches in length, and is of a dark reddish-brown 
color. The skin is of a shiny black hue, and 
under the throat hangs in a loose, flabby fold. 
The female is smaller, of a lighter brown color, 
and covered with short hair, which grows more 
evenly over the body and limbs. 
Anthropoid Apes. 
The term Anthropoid Apes is applied to the 
large, tailless quadrumanes, and is usually held 
to include the Gorilla, Chimpanzee, Nshiego- 
Bouve, Orang and Gibbons, although by some 
these last are placed apart. The group is char- 
acterized by the absence of a tail and by having 
the fore limbs much longer than the hind. 
The only fossil representatives are Dryopithecus 
Fontani, from the miocene of France, and a spe- 
cies of Piihecm, from the pliocene -of the same 
country. 
Curiously enough no fossil remains of Apes 
have been discovered in Africa or Borneo, al- 
though the lime-stone caves of Borneo have been 
carefully explored during the past three or four 
years by Mr. A. H. Everett. 
The distribution of these animals is peculiar. 
The Gorilla and Chimpanzee range on the west 
coast of Africa, from 8° south to 15° north, and 
inland to lake Tanganyika.* The Orang is found 
in Borneo and Sumatra, while the Gibbons in- 
habit Sumatra, Borneo, the Malay Peninsula, 
Siam, Burmah, N. E. India, and a small part of 
southern China. 
So much has been written about the Gorilla 
and Chimpanzee that it is useless to more than 
allude to them. They are dark grey or black in 
color and inhabit the densest forests, passing a 
considerable portion of their time on the ground. 
They assume an erect attitude with tolerable 
ease, but ordinarily walk on all fours. From 
the length and curve of the digits, the toes are 
doubled under the foot, and from the same cause 
the animal rests on the knuckles of the partially 
closed hands. On account of this peculiar mode 
of locomotion the large apes are sometimes 
termed knuckle walkers. 
Neither the Gorilla nor Chimpanzee can be 
called gregarious, although as many as eight or 
ten individuals are occasionally seen together; 
but the Chimpanzee is apparently the more soci- 
able of the two, besides being a little less shy in 
its habits. 
The Nshiego Bouve closely resembles the 
Chimpanzee in size and habits, but is distin- 
guished by the narrowness of its pelvis, a point 
in which it approaches the Gibbons. 
In connection with the tales of the ferocious 
disposition of the Gorilla, it may be worth while 
to mention Prof. Owen’s statement that nearly 
all appear to have been shot in the hack. A 
skeleton of Chimpanzee recently received here 
had been killed by a bullet in the eye, but the 
* This is given on the authority of Cameron and 
Stanley. 
