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Show 14 titled "Les Orang-outangs ou le Pongo ct le J ocko.'J To this title the following note is appended:- " Orang-outang nom de cot animal aux Inclcs orientales : P ongo nom de t animal a Lowando Province de Congo. "Jocko, Enjocko, nom do cot animal 0. Congo que nous avon ndople. Rn est !'article que nous avons retranche." Thus it was {hat Andrew Battell's "Engeco" became meta-h morp ose d 1· n t o "Jocko, '' and , in the latter ha.p e, wa pre.a d all over the world, in consequence of the xten 1vc popularity of Buffon's works. The Abbe Prevo t and Bufl'on betw en them however, did a good deal more di figurem nt to Batt 11' ob ~r account than 'cutting off an article.' Thu Bat tell' tatement that the Pongos "cannot speake, and have no understanding more than a beat," is rend red by uff n " q n'il ne peut parler quoiqu'il ait plus d' entendement que le autres w~imaux ;" and again, Purcha ' affirmation, " lie told me 1n conference with him, that one of the e Pongo took a negro boy of hi which lived a moneth with them," tand in the French version, " un pongo lui enleva un petit negre qui passa un an entier dans la ocietc de ce animaux." After quoting the account of the great Pongo, Buff on justly remarks, that all the' J ockos' and 'Orangs' hitherto brought to Europe were young; and he uggests that, in their adult condition, they might be as big a the Pongo or 'great Orang;' so that, provisionally, he regarded the J ockos, Orangs, and Pongos as all of one species. And perhaps this was as much as the state of knowledge at the time warranted. But how it came about that Buffon failed to perceive the similarity of Smith's 'Mandrill' to his own 'J ocko,' and confounded the former with so totally different a creature as the blue-faced Baboon, is not so easily intelligible. Twenty years later Buffon changed his opinion,* and expressed his belief that the Orangs constituted a genus with two species,-a large one, the Pongo ofBattell,and a small one, the Jocko: that the small one (J.ocko) is the East Indian Orang; • Ilistoirc Natmellc, Suppl. tome 7 me, 1789. 15 and that the young animals from Africa, observed by himself and Tulpius, are simply young Pongos. In the meanwhile, the Dutch naturalist, Vosmaer, gave, in 1778, a very good account and figure of a young Orang, brought alive to Holland, and his countryman, the famous anatomist) Peter Camper, published (1779) an essay on the Orang-Utan of similar value to that of Tyson on the Chimpanzee. He dissected several females and a male, all of which, from the state of their skeleton and their dentition, he justly supposes to have been young. However, judging by the analogy of man, he concludes that they could not have exceeded four feet in height in the adult condition. Furthermore, he is very clear as to the specific distinctness of the true East Indian Orang. ''The Orang," says he, ''differs not only from the Pigmy of Tyson and from the Orang of Tulpius by its peculiar colour and its long toes, but also by its whole external form. Its arms, its hands, and its feet are longer, while the thumbs, on the contrary, are much shorter, and the great toes much smaller in proportion."* And again, ''The true Orang, that is to say, that of Asia, that of Borneo, is consequently not the Pithecus, or tail-less Ape, which the Greeks, and especially Galen, have described. It is neither the Pongo nor the Jocko, nor the Orang of Tulpius, nor the Pigmy of Tyson,-it is an animal of a peculiar species, as I shall prove in the clearest manner by the organs of voice and the skeleton in the following chapters," (l. c. p. 64). A few years later, M. Radermacher, who held a high office in the Government of the Dutch dominions in India, and was an active member of the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences, published, in the second part of the Transactions of that Society,t a Description of the Island of Borneo, which was written between the years 1779 and 1781, and, among • Camper, CEuvres, I., p. 56. t Verhandelingcn van het Bataviaasch Gcnootschap. Tweeclc Dcel. Dcrde Drnk. 1826. |