‘And now truly he reminded me of nothing but some hellish dream-creature; a being of that hideous order, half-man, half-beast, which we find pictured by old artists in some representations of the infernal regions. He advanced a few steps, then stopped to utter that hideous roar again, advanced again, and finally stopped when at a distance of about six yards from us. And here, just as he began another of his roars, beating his breast in rage, we fired and killed him. With a groan which had something terribly human in it, and yet was full of brutishness, he fell forward on his face. The body shook convulsively for a few minutes, the limbs moved about in a struggling way, and then all was quiet—death had done its work, and I had leisure to examine the huge body. It proved to be five feet eight inches high, and the muscular development of the arms and breast showed what immense strength he had possessed.’
Deep in the swampy forests of Sumatra and Borneo, lives the famous Uran, or ‘Mias’ as he is called by the Malays. He is less human in his shape than the chimpanzee, as his hind-legs are shorter and his arms so long that they reach to his ankles, but in intelligence he is supposed to be his superior. The jaws are more projecting, and the thick pouting lips add to the brutal expression of his physiognomy. While in a well-proportioned human face the distance from the chin to the nose forms but a third of the total length, it amounts to one-half in the uran. But little of the restlessness of the monkey is to be seen in him. He loves an indolent repose, and the necessity for procuring food seems alone capable of rousing him from his laziness. When satiated, he immediately resumes his favourite position, sitting for hours together upon a branch, with bent back, with eyes immovably staring upon the ground, and uttering from time to time a melancholy growl. He generally spends the night on the crown of a nibong-palm or of a screw pine: he often also seeks a refuge against the wind and cold among the orchids and ferns which cover the branches of the giant trees. There he spreads his couch of small twigs and leaves, for he distinguishes himself from all other apes by his not sleeping in a sitting position, but on the back or on one side, and in inclement weather he is even said to cover his body with a layer of foliage. The Dyaks affirm that the Mias is never attacked by other animals, except by the crocodile and the tiger-snake. When there are no fruits in the jungle, he goes to the river banks, where he finds many young shoots which he likes to eat, and fruits which grow near to the water. Then the crocodile sometimes tries to seize him, but the Mias springs upon it, lacerates and kills it. An old Dyak chieftain told Mr. Wallace that he had once witnessed a combat of this kind, in which the Mias is invariably the conqueror. When attacked by a tiger-snake, he seizes the reptile with his hands and kills it with a vigorous bite. The Mias is very strong, stronger than any other animal of the jungle.
Rajah Brooke, who observed the sluggish Urans in their wild state, relates that even when chased and alarmed by the shouts of men and the firing, they never went from tree to tree faster than a man might easily follow through the jungle below. In general they sought the very summit of a lofty tree, and often remained seated without changing their position whilst several shots were discharged at them. The Dyaks catch them in the following manner. Having discovered the animal in a tree, they approach without disturbing him, and as quickly as possible cut down all the trees around the one he is in. Being previously provided with poles, some with nooses attached to the ends and others forked, they fell the isolated tree, and noosing and forking down the uran, soon make him their captive.
The series of the large anthropomorphous apes closes with the Gibbons. Their arms, which reach to the ankle joints when the animal is standing erect, are longer than those of the uran; their brain, and consequently their intelligence, is less developed; and moreover, like all the following simiæ of the Old World, they possess callosities on each side of the tail. Their size is inferior to that of the uran, and their body is covered with thicker hair, grey, brown, black, or white—according to the species—but never party-coloured, as is the case with many of the long-tailed monkeys.
To the gibbons belong the black Siamang of Sumatra—who, assembled in large troops, hails the first blush of early morn, and bids farewell to the setting sun with dreadful clamours—the black, white-bearded Lar of Siam and Malacca, and the Wou-Wou (Hylobates leuciscus), who, hanging suspended by his long arms, and swinging to and fro in the air, allows one to approach within fifty yards, and then, suddenly dropping upon a lower branch, climbs again leisurely to the top of the tree. He is a quiet, solitary creature of a melancholy peaceful nature, pursuing a harmless life, feeding upon fruits in the vast untrodden recesses of the forest; and his peculiar noise is in harmony with the sombre stillness of these dim regions, commencing like the gurgling of water when a bottle is being filled, and ending with a long loud wailing cry, which resounds throughout the leafy solitude to a great distance, and is sometimes responded to from the depths of the forest by another note as wild and melancholy.
Besides the uran and the gibbons, Asia exclusively possesses the Semnopitheci and the Macaques, while Africa, besides the chimpanzee and the gorilla, enjoys the undivided honour of giving birth to the families of the Cercopitheci, Mangabeys, Colobi, Magots, and Baboons.
The Semnopitheci are characterised by a short face, rounded ears, a slender body, short thumbs, and a strong muscular tail, terminated by a close tuft of hair, and surpassing in length that of all the other quadrumana of the Old World. To this genus belongs the celebrated Proboscis Monkey (Semnopithecus nasicus) of Borneo, who is distinguished from all other simiæ by the possession of a prominent nasal organ, which lends a highly ludicrous expression to the melancholy aspect of his physiognomy. ‘When excited and angry,’ says Mr. Adams, who had many opportunities of examining this singular creature in its native woods, ‘the female resembles some tanned and peevish, hag, snarling and shrewish. They progress on all-fours, and sometimes, while on the ground, raise themselves upright and look about them. When they sleep, they squat on their hams, and bow their heads upon the breast. When disturbed, they utter a short impatient cry, between a sneeze and a scream, like that of a spoilt and passionate child; and in the selection of their food they appear very dainty, frequently destroying a fruit, and hardly tasting it. When they emit their peculiar wheezing or hissing sound, they avert and wrinkle the nose, and open the mouth wide. In the male, the nose is a curved, tubular trunk, large, pendulous, and fleshy; but in the female it is smaller, recurved, and not caruncular.’
Under the ugly form of the Huniman (Semnopithecus Entellus), the Hindoos venerate the transformed hero who abstracted the sweet fruit of the mango from the garden of a giant in Ceylon, and enriched India with the costly gift. Out of gratitude for this service, the Hindoos allow him the free use of their gardens, and take great care to protect him from sacrilegious Europeans. While the French naturalist Duvaucel was at Chandernagor, a guard of pious Brahmins was busy scaring away the sacred animals with cymbals and drums, lest the stranger, to whom they very justly attributed evil intentions, might be tempted to add their skins to his collection.
The Semnopitheci are scattered over Asia in so great a multiplicity of forms, that Ceylon alone possesses four different species, each of which has appropriated to itself a different district of the wooded country, and seldom encroaches on the domain of its neighbours. ‘When observed in their native wilds,’ says Sir J. E. Tennent, ‘a party of twenty or thirty of the Wanderoos of the low country, the species best known in Europe (Presbytes cephalopterus), is generally busily engaged in the search for berries and buds. They are seldom to be seen on the ground, and then only when they have descended to recover seeds or fruit that have fallen at the foot of their favourite trees. In their alarm, when disturbed, their leaps are prodigious, but generally speaking their progress is made not so much by leaping as by swinging from branch to branch, using their powerful arms alternately, and when baffled by distance, flinging themselves obliquely so as to catch the lower bough of an opposite tree; the momentum acquired by their descent being sufficient to cause a rebound, that carries them again upwards till they can grasp a higher branch, and thus continue their headlong flight. In these perilous achievements wonder is excited less by the surpassing agility of these little creatures, frequently encumbered as they are by their young, which cling to them in their career, than by the quickness of their eye and the unerring accuracy with which they seem to calculate almost the angle at which a descent would enable them to cover a given distance, and the recoil to elevate themselves again to a higher altitude.’
The African Colobi greatly resemble the Asiatic Semnopitheci, but differ by the remarkable circumstance of having no thumb on the hands of their anterior extremities.