cheeks with all its might in the vain effort to extract some milk, and only after persevering
for a long time would it give up in disgust, and set up a scream very like a baby in similar
circumstances.Returning to Kuching, Wallace was invited to spend Christmas with Rajah Brooke
and his entourage at their mountain retreat. After months alone with his assistant,
Wallace found their company stimulating and their conversations were wide ranging.
The rajah was a firm creationist, but he loved debate and his secretary later wrote
that ‘although Wallace could not convince us that our ugly neighbours, the orang-
utans, were our ancestors, he pleased, delighted and instructed us by his clever and
inexhaustible flow of talk’.
Wallace wrote three papers on the orangutan. The first on the number of species
entitled On the Orang-Utan or Mias of Borneo and the second entitled On the Habits
of the Orang-Utan of Borneo. Wallace was the first naturalist to observe and describe
orangutans in their natural habitat. He also observed that the orangutan had the
same number of teeth, of the same type, and in the same position as humans. These
similarities to human form and behaviour must have made an impression because in
his third paper he raised an entirely new idea, which was the possible descent of both
humans and the orangutan from some common ancestor. Although his speculative
view appears to have been entirely overlooked at the time, this in 1855 may have been
the first time a scientist had written of the possibility of an ape-like species taking
human form:
With what anxious expectation must we look forward to the time when the progress of
civilization in these hitherto wild countries may lay open the ‘monuments of a former
world’, and enable us to ascertain approximately the period when the present species of
Orangs first made their appearance, and perhaps prove the former existence of an allied
species still more gigantic in their dimensions, and more or less human in their form and
structure.During the rainy season Wallace found himself holed up in a small house near the
impressive mass of Mount Santubong which, with its sheer limestone cliffs, marks the
entrance to the broad reach of Sarawak River which is navigable as far inland as the
settlement of Kuching and the residence of the rajah. Wallace describes his situation
there:
I was alone with only a Malay boy as cook, and during the evenings and wet days I had
nothing to do but to look over my books and ponder over the problem which was rarely
absent from my thoughts ... given a mass of facts as to the distribution of animals all overAlfred Russel Wallace – In Singapore and Borneo 133