Notes sur l’osteometrie et la craniologie des Orang-Outans.: Extra-Illustrated with photographs, engravings and lithographs

Extracted from Nouvelles Archives de Musée d'Histoire Naturelle. 1895, 3. série, tome. VII. pp. (83)-114 with four text woodcuts and two chromolithographed plates by A. Millot (Lit. Lemercier) showing Max and Maurice.

Contemporary calf backed marbled boards, spine ruled and lettered in gilt.

An extra-illustrated volume with 22 engravings, lithographs, half-tones and especially important 9 mounted original photographs by an unknown photographer showing the two orangoutans (living and as stuffed animals) with their zookeeper, their taxidermist (?) and with an exotic looking young male. It must have been a fascinating entertainment for the Parisian public and it is said that they attracted more than 100.000 visitors in 1893. They were imported from Borneo and travelled throughout Europe, public viewing was possible in Antwerp, Bruxelles and Paris. Within a year they died from stress and pneumonia. Ernst Pinkert from the Leipzig Zoological Gardens eventually bought them to nurse them back to health again, but unfortunately they never reached German borders. The photographs are of exceptional rarity. The copy probably belonged to or was made up by Adolphe Philippe Millot (1857–1921), a French painter, and lithographer, the senior illustrator at the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, who was also responsible for the illustrations used in many of the natural history sections of the Petit Larousse encyclopedia. He used the photographs of the living orangoutans as study objects for his own chromolithographs of them together with informations given to him, and also the photographs of the stuffed animals, and the wax models produced after them. The word orangoutan (also orang-utan, orang utan and oranutan) is derived from the Malay and Indonesian words orang meaning "person" and hutan meaning "forest", thus "person of the forest". The word was first attested in English in 1691 in the form orang-outang. The name of the genus, Pongo, comes from a 16th century account by Andrew Battell, an English sailor held prisoner by the Portuguese in Angola, which describes two anthropoid "monsters" named Pongo and Engeco. It is now believed that he was describing gorillas, but in the late 18th century it was believed that all great apes were orangoutans; hence Lacépède's use of Pongo for the genus. A few brown spots here and there else a nice copy of an interesting and unique compilation of various illustrated material on the orangoutan.