Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Alfred Wallace’s Baby Orangutan: Game, Pet, Specimen

  • Original Research
  • Published:
Journal of the History of Biology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Alfred Russell Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago, published in 1869, is a classic text in natural history and the theory of evolution. Amidst heroic hunting narratives and picturesque descriptions of local fauna and flora, stands out a curious episode in which Wallace describes adopting a baby orangutan, whose mother he had killed. Wallace, a British naturalist and collector, cultivated an affectionate relationship with the orphaned orangutan, often referring to her as his “baby.” This paper examines how the orangutan was transformed from being a moving target for museum display, to a beloved companion but also a scientific specimen. In this process, Wallace redesigned his colonial bungalow to a space that combined domestic settings with engineered nature-like environments, a familiar construction in later primate research. I use Wallace’s adoption episode to discuss how affect and care were interwoven into the exploitative relations of British naturalists and physiologists and the animals they studied. The account of Wallace’s idiosyncratic relationship with the orangutan is augmented with additional documentation of the close relationships of scientists with research animals, staged as familial kinship. The emergence of the “laboratory pet” demonstrates how the production of knowledge, the sharing of households, and human-animal emotional ties were interwoven in early biomedical research.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. The name orangutan probably came to English through the Dutch, although the compound was not the Malay term for the animal (see, "orangutan, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press. www.oed.com. Accessed 27 November 2019).

  2. Wallace published this version anonymously (Smith et al. 2010, p. 167).

  3. Wallace referred to the baby orangutan as "it” in his official publications and used “her” and “it” interchangeably in the letter to his family. In this paper, I refer to the orangutan as “she” unless quoting Wallace.

  4. Europeans’ encounters with new materials in the colonial context not only changed Western science, but they also raised epistemological questions (Shmuely 2019).

  5. The controversy about the association of humans with nonhuman primates was no less heated on the Continent. Spiritualists and materialists at the Paris Société d’Anthropologie debated whether man belongs to the same order as the apes (Blanckaert 1995).

  6. Letter to George Robert Waterhouse, 8 May 1855, Natural History Museum Digital Archive, Wallace Letters Online, WCP781.953. http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/scientific-resources/collections/library-collections/wallace-letters-online/index.html. Accessed 2 September 2018, hereafter cited as “Wallace Letters.” Today three species of orangutans are identified under the genus Pongo: the Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii), the Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus), and the Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis), which was announced in 2017. The Bornean orangutan is composed of three sub-species: Northwest Bornean orangutan, Northeast Bornean orangutan, and Central Bornean orangutan.

  7. Letter to Henry Walter Bates, 30 April 1856, WCP364, Wallace Letters.

  8. John van Wyhe provides a vivid portrayal of the life in Sarawak during Wallace’s time there (2013, p. 97).

  9. Letter to Samuel Stevens, 12 May 1856, WCP1702.1584, Wallace Letters. .

  10. On travel writing in the specific context of Singapore during the high colonial era, see Ling (2003).

  11. Letter to George Robert Waterhouse, 8 May 1855, WCP781.953, Wallace Letters.

  12. Letter to Samuel Stevens, 12 May 1856, WCP1702.1584, Wallace Letters.

  13. Letter to George Robert Waterhouse, 8 May 1855, WCP781.953, Wallace Letters.

  14. Biographer Michael Shermer argued that Wallace expressed egalitarian attitudes in relation to race and civilization (2011, pp. 221–222). In contrast, van Wyhe contends that Wallace’s views were racist and typical of the time (2014, pp. 31–33).

  15. The image was drawn by James Davis Cooper, who also executed engravings for Charles Darwin (Van Wyhe 2014, p. 24). Images of a female orangutan and the magnificent bird of paradise were printed on the title pages of the first and second volumes of the Malay Archipelago (Wallace 1869).

  16. The specimen of the baby orangutan is apparently lost (George Beccaloni, personal communication, 2019). The World Museum in Liverpool holds a dry skin of another juvenile orangutan hunted by Wallace. I am grateful to Lord Cranbrook, George Beccaloni, and John James Wilson for their advice and guidance in my search for the specimen.

  17. "Pet, n.2 and adj." OED Online, Oxford University Press. www.oed.com. Accessed 27 November 2019.

  18. Waller Chloroform Balance, The Physiological Society's Photographic Collection, SA/PHY/Z/4/9/1-68, Wellcome Collection, London.

  19. Augustus Desire Waller in his Laboratory, The Physiological Society's Photographic Collection, SA/PHY/Z/4/9/1-68, Wellcome Collection, London.

  20. House of Commons, Vol. 7, 8 July 1909, Column 1411. Hansard Online. https://hansard.parliament.uk/. Accessed 2 September 2018.

  21. Memorial to the Rt. Hon. The Secretary of State for the Home Department, Unanimously Approved at a Meeting Held March 18, 1884. Together with a Memorandum Appended Hereunto by the Council of the Association for the Advancement of Medicine by Research, SA/RDS/A/3, Wellcome Collection, London; hereafter cited as: Memorandum.

  22. Memorandum, p. 8.

  23. Vivisection: Dr. Poore's Report of Inspection of Registered Places in 1895, HO 144/383/B19846A, p. 13, The National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, UK; hereafter cited as: Inspection of Registered Places.

  24. Inspection of Registered Places, p. 14.

References

  • Alberti, Samuel J.M.M. 2011. The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. 2006. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ankeny, Rachel A., and Sabina, Leonelli. 2011. What’s so Special About Model Organisms? Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 42 (2): 313–323.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anonymous. 24 June 1884. Honest Poverty. The North-Eastern Daily Gazette, 5300. https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000159/18840624/003/0002. Accessed 27 Nov 2019.

  • Arluke, Arnold. 1988. Sacrificial Symbolism in Animal Experimentation: Object or Pet? Anthrozoös 2 (2): 98–117.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bates, AWH. 2017. Anti-Vivisection and the Profession of Medicine in Britain: A Social History. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beccaloni, George William. 2017. Introduction. In The Malay Archipelago, 10–43. London: Folio Society.

  • Benson, Etienne. 2011. Animal Writes: Historiography, Disciplinarity, and the Animal Trace. In Making Animal Meaning, ed. Linda Kaloff and Georgina Montgomery, 3–16. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Benton, Ted. 1997. Where to Draw the Line?: Alfred Russel Wallace in Borneo. Studies in Travel Writing 1 (1): 96–116.

    Google Scholar 

  • Besterman, E., and R. Creese. 1979. Waller-Pioneer of Electrocardiography. Heart 42 (1): 61–64.

    Google Scholar 

  • Birke, Lynda I.A. 1994. Feminism, Animals and Science: The Naming of the Shrew. Buckingham: Open University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bishop, Rebecca. 2010. Some Other Kind of Being: Human Nature and Animal Subjects in Ape Language Research. Feminism & Psychology 20 (3): 350–364.

    Google Scholar 

  • Blanckaert, Claude. 1995. La question du singe et l’ordre des primates à la Société d’anthropologie de Paris (1865–1870). In Ape, Man, Apeman: Changing Views since 1600, ed. Raymond Corbey and Bert Theunissen, 117–137. Leiden: Department of Prehistory, Leiden University.

  • Boddice, Rob. 2011. Vivisecting Major: A Victorian Gentleman Scientist Defends Animal Experimentation, 1876–1885. Isis 102 (2): 215–237.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boddice, Rob. 2012. Species of Compassion: Aesthetics, Anaesthetics, and Pain in the Physiological Laboratory. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. 15. https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.62815.

  • Boomgaard, Peter. 2001. Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and People in the Malay World, 1600-1950. New Haven: Yale University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Browne, Janet. 2001a. Darwin in Caricature: A Study in the Popularisation and Dissemination of Evolution. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 145 (4): 496–509.

    Google Scholar 

  • Browne, Janet. 2001b. Natural History Collecting and the Biogeographical Tradition. História, Ciências, Saúde: Manguinhos 8: 959–967.

    Google Scholar 

  • Browne, Janet. 2003. Charles Darwin: A Biography, Vol. 2. The Power of Place. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  • Chakrabarti, Pratik. 2010. Beasts of Burden: Animals and Laboratory Research in Colonial India. History of Science 48 (2): 125–151.

    Google Scholar 

  • Corbey, Raymond H A. 2005. The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal-Human Boundary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cranbrook, Earl of, Daphne M. Hills, Colin J. McCarthy, and Robert Pryes-Jones. 2005. A. R. Wallace Collector: Tracing His Vertebrate Specimen, Part 1. In Wallace in Sarawak– 150 Years Later. An International Conference on Biogeography and Biodiversity, ed. Andrew Alek Tuen and Indraneil Das, 8–34. Sarawak: Institute of Biodiversity and Environmental Conservation, University Malaysia Sarawak.

  • Cribb, Robert, Helen Gilbert, and Helen Tiffin. 2014. Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan. Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawai’i Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Darwin, Charles. [1859] 1968. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. London: Penguin Books.

  • Despret, Vinciane. 2004. The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-Zoo-Genesis. Body & Society 10 (2–3): 111–134.

    Google Scholar 

  • Despret, Vinciane. 2016. What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dror, Otniel. 1999. The Affect of Experiment: The Turn to Emotions in Anglo-American Physiology, 1900-1940. Isis 90 (2): 205–237.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dror, Otniel. 2001. Techniques of the Brain and the Paradox of Emotions, 1880–1930. Science in Context 14 (4): 643–660.

    Google Scholar 

  • Elston, Mary Ann. 1990. Women and Anti-Vivisection in Victorian England, 1870–1900. In Vivisection in Historical Perspective, ed. Nicolaas A. Rupke, 259–294. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fagan, Melinda B. 2007. Wallace, Darwin, and the Practice of Natural History. Journal of the History of Biology 40 (4): 601–635.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fudge, Erica. 2017. What Was It Like to Be a Cow? History and Animal Studies. In The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies, ed. Linda Kalof. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grier, Katherine. 2006. Pets in America: A History. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gregory, William K, Raven, Henry Cushier. 1937. In Quest of Gorillas. New Bedford: The Darwin Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 1989. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2007. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Herzfeld, Chris. 2016. Wattana, an Orangutan in Paris. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Herzfeld, Chris. 2017. The Great Apes: A Short History. New Haven: Yale University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hobbins, Peter. 2017. Venomous Encounters: Snakes, Vivisection and Scientific Medicine in Colonial Australia. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Holmberg, Tora. 2011. Mortal Love: Care Practices in Animal Experimentation. Feminist Theory 12 (2): 147–163.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hurst, J. Willis, W. Bruce Fye, and Louis J. Acierno. 2000. Profiles in Cardiology: Augustus Desiré Waller. Clinical Cardiology 23 (4): 307–309.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hussain, Shafwat. 2012. Forms of Predation: Tiger and Markhor Hunting in Colonial Governance. Modern Asian Studies 46 (5): 1212–1238.

    Google Scholar 

  • Huxley, Thomas Henry. [1863] 2003. Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature. New York: Dover Publications.

  • Igra, Alma. 2019. Mandate of Compassion: Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Palestine, 1919–1939. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 47 (4): 773–799.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kete, Kathleen. 1995. The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kirk, Robert G.W. 2012. Standardization through Mechanization: Germ-Free Life and the Engineering of the Ideal Laboratory Animal. Technology and Culture 53 (1): 61–93.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmreich. 2010. The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 25 (4): 545–576.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kjærgaard, Peter. 2011. “Hurrah for the Missing Link!”: A History of Apes, Ancestors and a Crucial Piece of Evidence. Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 65 (1): 83–98.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kohler, Robert E. 1994. Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lederer, Susan E. 1994. Moral Sensibility and Medical Science: Gender, Animal Experimentation, and the Doctor-Patient Relationship. In The Empathic Practitioner: Empathy, Gender, and Medicine, ed. Ellen More. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lewalter, Thorsten, and Berndt Lüderitz. 2003. Historical Milestones of Electrical Signal Recording and Analysis. In Cardiac Repolarization: Bridging Basic and Clinical Science, ed. Ihor Gussak, Charles Antzelevitch, Stephen C Hammill, Win K Shen, and Preben Bjerregaard, 7–21. Totowa, NJ: Humana.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ling, Han Mui. 2003. From Travelogues to Guidebooks: Imagining Colonial Singapore, 1819-1940. Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 18 (2): 257–278.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lynch, Michael. 1988. Sacrifice and the Transformation of the Animal Body into a Scientific Object: Laboratory Culture and Ritual Practice in the Neurosciences. Social Studies of Science 18 (2): 265–289.

    Google Scholar 

  • MacKenzie, John. 1988. The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation, and British Imperialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marks, Jonathan. 2003. What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mehrabi, Tara, and Cecilia Åsberg. 2018. Model Territories: Choreographies of Laboratory Flies. In Animal Places: Lively Cartographies of Human-Animal Relations, ed. Jacob Bull, Tora Holmberg, and Cecilia Åsberg, 162–182. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller, Ian Jared. 2013. The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Montagu, M.F. Ashley. 1940. Knowledge of the Ape in Antiquity. Isis 32 (1): 87–102.

    Google Scholar 

  • Morgan, Conwy Lloyd. 1894. An Introduction to Comparative Psychology. London: Walter Scott Ltd.

    Google Scholar 

  • Novick, Tamar. 2019. All about Stavit: A Beastly Biography. Theory and Criticism 51: 61–86 (in Hebrew).

    Google Scholar 

  • Owen, Richard. 1865. Memoir on the Gorilla: (Troglodytes Gorilla, Savage). London: Taylor and Francis.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pratt, Mary Louise. 2007. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Raby, Peter. 2002. Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rader, Karen. 2004. Making Mice: Standardizing Animals for American Biomedical Research, 1900-1955. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Radick, Gregory. 2008. The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ritvo, Harriet. 1986. Pride and Pedigree: The Evolution of the Victorian Dog Fancy. Victorian Studies 29 (2): 227–253.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ritvo, Harriet. 1989. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ritvo, Harriet. 2004. Animal Planet. Environmental History 9 (2): 204–220.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ritvo, Harriet. 2014. Among Animals. Environment and History 20 (4): 491–498.

    Google Scholar 

  • Romanes, George John. 1882. Animal Intelligence. London: K. Paul, Trench.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rookmaaker, Kees, and John van Wyhe. 2012. In Alfred Russel Wallace’s Shadow: His Forgotten Assistant, Charles Allen (1839–1892). Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 85 (2): 17–54.

    Google Scholar 

  • Royal Commission on Vivisection. 1876. Report of the Royal Commission on the Practice of Subjecting Live Animals to Experiments for Scientific Purposes. London: G.E. Eyre & W. Spottiswoode, for H.M. Stationery Office.

    Google Scholar 

  • Saha, Jonathan. 2015. Among the Beasts of Burma: Animals and the Politics of Colonial Sensibilities, c. 1840–1940. Journal of Social History 48 (4): 910–32.

  • Salazar Parreñas, Juno. 2018. Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schiebinger, Londa. 2007. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shermer, Michael. 2011. In Darwin’s Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace: A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shmuely, Shira. 2019. Curare: The Poisoned Arrow that Entered the Laboratory and Sparked a Moral Debate. Social History of Medicine. hky124, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hky124.

  • Smith, Charles H, Beccaloni, George. 2010. Natural Selection and Beyond: The Intellectual Legacy of Alfred Russel Wallace. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Charles, Michael Taylor, and Gerrell M. Drawhorn. 2010. Alfred Russel Wallace Notes 1: Authorship of Two Early Works. Archives of Natural History 37 (1): 167–169.

    Google Scholar 

  • Soto Laveaga, Gabriela. 2009. Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sramek, Joseph. 2006. “Face Him Like a Briton”: Tiger Hunting, Imperialism, and British Masculinity in Colonial India, 1800-1875. Victorian Studies 48 (4): 659–680.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tsao, Tiffany. 2013. The Multiplicity of Humanity in the Orangutan Adoption Accounts of Alfred Russel Wallace and William Temple Hornaday. Clio 43 (1): 1–31.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tuan, Yi-Fu. 2004. Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. New Haven: Yale University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tyson, Edward. [1699] 1966. Orang-Outang, Sive Homo Sylvestris: Or, The Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with That of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man. To Which Is Added, A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies, the Cynocephali, the Satyrs, and Sphinges of the Ancients. Wherein It Will Appear That They Are All Either Apes or Monkeys, and Not Men, as Formerly Pretended. London: Dawsons.

  • Van Wyhe, John. 2013. Dispelling the Darkness Voyage in the Malay Archipelago and the Discovery of Evolution by Wallace and Darwin. Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific.

    Google Scholar 

  • Van Wyhe, John, ed. 2014. Introduction. In The Annotated Malay Archipelago, 1–38. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press.

  • Van Wyhe, John, and Gerrell M. Drawhorn. 2015. “I Am Ali Wallace”: The Malay Assistant of Alfred Russel Wallace. Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 88 (1): 3–31.

    Google Scholar 

  • Van Wyhe, John, and Peter C. Kjærgaard. 2015. Going the Whole Orang: Darwin, Wallace and the Natural History of Orangutans. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 51: 53–63.

    Google Scholar 

  • Veracini, Cecilia, and Dante Martins Teixeiras. 2017. Perception and Description of New World Non-Human Primates in the Travel Literature of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: A Critical Review. Annals of Science 74 (1): 25–63.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vicedo, Marga. 2010. The Evolution of Harry Harlow: From the Nature to the Nurture of Love. History of Psychiatry 21 (82 Pt 2): 190–205.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wadler, Joyce. 2009. Reunion with a Childhood Bully, Taxidermied. The New York Times, June 5. http://www.nytimes.com. Accessed 1 Sept 2019.

  • Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1856a. Some Account of an Infant Orang-Utan. Annals and Magazine of Natural History 17 (2): 386–390.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1856b. A New Kind of Baby. Chamber’s Journal 151: 325–327.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1869. The Malay Archipelago the Land of the Orang-Utan, and the Bird of Paradise, 1 vols. New York: Harpers and Brothers Pullishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1905. My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wanderer, Emily Mannix. 2015. Biologies of Betrayal: Judas Goats and Sacrificial Mice on the Margins of Mexico. BioSocieties 10 (1): 1–23.

    Google Scholar 

  • White, Paul. 2006. Sympathy under the Knife: Experimentation and Emotion in Late Victorain Medicine. In Medicine, Emotion and Disease, 1700-1950, ed. Fay Bound Alberti, 100–124. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

  • White, Paul. 2009. Darwin’s Emotions: The Scientific Self and the Sentiment of Objectivity. Isis 100 (4): 811–826.

    Google Scholar 

  • Woods, Rebecca. 2017. The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800–1900. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the hospitality of Dagmar Schäfer and Department III at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. For comments on early drafts I thank Daniel Mann, Omer Michaelis, Tamar Novick, Lisa Onaga, Martina Schlünder, Skuli Sigurdsson, and Mariaana Szczygielska. I appreciate the careful reading and excellent comments by anonymous reviewers. Special thanks to Rebecca J. H. Woods, Sarah S. Richardson, and Harriet Ritvo.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel-Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Shira Shmuely

Authors
  1. Shira Shmuely
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shira Shmuely.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Shmuely, S. Alfred Wallace’s Baby Orangutan: Game, Pet, Specimen. J Hist Biol 53, 321–343 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-020-09611-8

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-020-09611-8

Keywords

Search

Navigation