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Updated: May 14, 2025
The "orang-utan" rarely descends to terra firma, but moves slowly from tree to tree, the density of the branches rendering this comparatively easy, and is easily kept up with by the hunter, as this strange animal never essays to get away altogether, even when severely wounded.
In Borneo the Orang-Utan of the Malays goes by the name of "Mias" among the Dyaks, who distinguish several kinds as 'Mias Pappan', or 'Zimo', 'Mias Kassu', and 'Mias Rambi'. Whether these are distinct species, however, or whether they are mere races, and how far any of them are identical with the Sumatran Orang, as Mr.
Let us hope the autopsist will not have a chance to weigh Edison's brain for many years, but when he does the mark will register fifty-seven ounces. An orang-utan weighs about the same as a man, but its brain weighs only a pound, against three pounds for a man. Give a gorilla a brain weighing fifty ounces, and he would be a Methodist Presiding Elder.
Beyond the Moluccas, across the Banda Sea, sprawls the Celebes, familiar from our school-days because of its fantastic outline, the plural form of its name being due to the supposition of the early explorers that it was a group of islands instead of one. And finally, crossing Makassar Straits, we come to Borneo, the habitat of the head-hunter and the orang-utan.
Human blood serum behaves in a hostile fashion to the blood of eel, pigeon, horse, dog, cat, and even to that of Lemuroids, or that of the more remotely related “non-anthropoid” monkey; human blood transfused from a negro into a white unites readily, as does also that of orang-utan transfused into a gibbon.
Thus when, in 1766, Buffon wrote the fourteenth volume of his great work, he was personally familiar with the young of one kind of African man-like Ape, and with the adult of an Asiatic species while the Orang-Utan and the Mandrill of Smith were known to him by report.
The professor went into perplexed raptures, his mind being distracted by the exuberant wealth of subjects which were presented to it all at the same time. "Look zere!" he cried, at one turning in the path which opened up a new vista of exquisite beauty "look at zat!" "Ay, it is a Siamang ape next in size to the orang-utan," said Van der Kemp, who stood at his friend's elbow.
He was ten feet high, some romancers said, with shoulders four feet broad, a chest like a sugar-hogs-head, and a countenance resembling a compound of orang-utan and tiger. Of course our hero knew nothing of these rumours, and as Moses declined to give any information regarding his master beyond that already given, he was left to the full play of his imagination. Moses was quite candid about it.
"Not in years," he returned; "but old, very old in experience, and stay, what was it that you were asking about? Ah, the big game. Well, we have plenty of that in some of the larger of the islands; we have the elephant, the rhinoceros, the tiger, the puma, that great man-monkey the orang-utan, or, as it is called here, the mias, besides wild pigs, deer, and innumerable smaller animals and birds "
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 an essay on the Orang-Utan of similar value to that of Tyson on the Chimpanzee.
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