he thought it was "an annual ceremony, with which, as an alien, he had nothing to do". Burnett in his earlier years suggested that the orangutan was a form of man, although some analysts think that some of his presentation was designed to entice his critics into debate. The orangutan was at this time a generic term for all types of apes. The Swedish explorer whose evidence Burnett accepted was a naval officer who had viewed a group of monkeys and thought they were human. Burnett may simply have taken the view that it was reasonable for people to assume the things they do and the word of a naval officer trained to give accurate reports was a credible source. Burnett was indeed responsible for changing the classical definition of man as a creature of reason to a creature capable of achieving reason, although he viewed this process as one slow and difficult to achieve. At one time he said that humans must have all been born with tails, which were removed by midwives at birth. His contemporaries ridiculed his views, and by 1773 he had retracted this opinion (Pringle 1773). Some later commentators have seen him as anticipating evolutionary theory. He appeared to argue that animal species adapted and changed to survive, and his observations on the progression of primates to man amounted to some kind of concept of evolution. Burnett also examined feral children and was the only thinker of his day to accept them as human rather than monsters. He viewed in these children the ability to achieve reason. He identified the orangutan as human, as his sources indicated it was capable of experiencing shame. In popular culture In Thomas Love Peacock's 1817 novel Melincourt, an orangutan punningly named "Sir Oran Haut-Ton" becomes a candidate for British Parliament based on Monboddo's theories. Charles Dickens, in his novel Martin Chuzzlewit, refers to "the Manboddo doctrine touching the probability of the human race having once been monkeys". In his 1981 dystopian novel Lanark, Alasdair Gray names the head of the mysterious Institute Lord Monboddo. He makes the connection explicit in a marginal note, adding that it is not a literal depiction. Lord Monboddo's descendant, Jamie Burnett of Leys, has sponsored a stage work Monboddo – The Musical which is a biographical re-enactment of the life of his ancestor. It received a first run at Aberdeen Arts Centre in September