He said: "The Mias has no enemies; no animals dare attack it but the crocodile and the python.

He always kills the crocodile by main strength, standing upon it, pulling open its jaws, and ripping up its throat.

If a python attacks a Mias, he seizes it with his hands, and then bites it, and soon kills it.

The Mias is very strong; there is no animal in the jungle so strong as he." It is very remarkable that an animal so large, so peculiar, and of such a high type of form as the Orangutan, should be confined to so limited a district--to two islands, and those almost the last inhabited by the higher Mammalia; for, east of Borneo and Java, the Quadrumania, Ruminants, Carnivora, and many other groups of Mammalia diminish rapidly, and soon entirely disappear.

When we consider, further, that almost all other animals have in earlier ages been represented by allied yet distinct forms--that, in the latter part of the tertiary period, Europe was inhabited by bears, deer, wolves, and cats; Australia by kangaroos and other marsupials; South America by gigantic sloths and ant-eaters; all different from any now existing, though intimately allied to them--we have every reason to believe that the Orangutan, the Chimpanzee, and the Gorilla have also had their forerunners.