Page:Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature.djvu/36

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
30
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE MAN-LIKE APES.

early as 1818, it appears that Cuvier saw reason to alter this opinion, and to adopt the view suggested several years before by Blumenbach,[1] and after him by Tilesius, that the Bornean Pongo is simply an adult Orang. In 1824, Rudolphi demonstrated, by the condition of the dentition, more fully and completely than had been done by his predecessors, that the Orangs described up to that time were all young animals, and that the skull and teeth of the adult would probably be such as those seen in the Pongo of Wurmb. In the second edition of the 'Regne Animal' (1829), Cuvier infers, from the 'proportions of all the parts' and 'the arrangements of the foramina and sutures of the head,' that the Pongo is the adult of the Orang-Utan,' at least of a very closely allied species,' and this conclusion was eventually placed beyond all doubt by Professor Owen's Memoir published in the 'Zoological Transactions' for 1835, and by Temminck in his 'Monographies de Mammalogie.' Temminck's memoir is remarkable for the completeness of the evidence which it affords as to the modification which the form of the Orang undergoes according to age and sex. Tiedemann first published an account of the brain of the young Orang, while Sandifort, Müller and Schlegel, described the muscles and the viscera of the adult, and gave the earliest detailed and trustworthy history of the habits of the great Indian Ape in a state of nature; and as important additions have been made by later observers, we are at this moment better acquainted with the adult of the Orang-Utan, than with that of any of the other greater man-like Apes.

It is certainly the Pongo of Wurmb;[2] and it is as

  1. See Blumenbach, "Abbildungen Naturhistorichen Gegenstände," No. 12, 1810; and Tilesius, "Naturhistoriche Früchte der ersten Kaiserlich-Russischen Erdumsegelung," p. 115, 1813.
  2. Speaking broadly and without prejudice to the question, whether there be more than one species of Orang.