Dr. Yvan, attached to the expedition which the French government sent to China in 1843,[45] has given us an account of an orang-outang at Borneo, which is, perhaps, the best plea in favour of the connexion between primates and mankind. Tuân, as this animal was called, began to dress himself directly a bit of any stuff, or cloth, got in his way.[46] On one occasion, when his master had taken a mangrove from him, “he uttered plaintive cries like a child when it is sulky. This conduct not having been so successful as he expected, he threw himself on his face upon the ground, struck the earth with his fist, screamed, cried, and howled, for more than half-an-hour.” When the mangrove was given back to him, he threw it at the head of his master.[47] It is a curious fact, but the particular friend of Tuân was a negro from Manilla. At Manilla, he accustomed himself to Tagal[48] manners, and played with the children. “One day, when Tuân was rolling on some matting with a little girl, about four or five years old, he stopped all of a sudden, and examined the child in a most minute and anatomical manner. The results of his investigations seemed to astonish him profoundly; he retired on one side, and repeated upon himself the same examination which he had made on his little playmate.” We may all remember the eloquent pages in Buffon, where, admitting the Adamic legend, he recounts the impressions of our first parents. Has not nature been here, we ask, a better historian than our naturalist, even with all his genius? Over and above these facts, as their crowning-point, we must invoke as a witness the man who has carried farthest the spirit of philosophy in the natural sciences in France, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. A cautious and profound observer, he mingled with the crowd which the orang drew to the Museum in 1836. Mistrusting his own judgment, he gathered the opinions of all those who surrounded him,--of all the visitors who, as he said, “came to observe as unprejudiced spectators, without any preconceived ideas, and without being hindered by those deplorable trammels which we call our rules of classification.”[49] The result surprised even Etienne Geoffroy himself. These visitors, so different one from the other, all united in this idea, “that the animal from Sumatra was neither a man nor an ape: _neither one nor the other_, that was what the mind of each person at once acknowledged.”