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of a favourite tree, the gorilla, stealing along the bough, strikes 

 the sensitive proboscis of the elephant with a violent blow of his 

 club, and drives off the startled giant trumpeting shrilly with 

 rage and pain. 



In passing along the ground from one detached tree to another 

 the gorilla is said to walk semi-erect, with the aid of his club, but 

 with a waddling awkward gait ; when without a stick, he has been 

 seen to walk as a biped, with his hands clasped across the back of 

 his head, instinctively so counterpoising its forward projection. If 

 the gorilla be surprised and approached while on the ground, he 

 drops his stick, betakes himself to all-fours, applying the back part of 

 the bent knuckles of his fore-hands to the ground, and makes his 

 way rapidly, with an oblique swinging kind of gallop, to the nearest 

 tree. There he awaits his pursuer, especially if his family be near, 

 and requiring his defence. No negro willingly approaches the tree 

 in which the male gorilla keeps guard. Even with a gun the negro 

 does not rashly make the attack, but reserves his lire in self-defence. 

 The enmity of the gorilla to the whole negro race, male and female, 

 is uniformly testified to. The young men of the Gaboon tribe make 

 armed excursions into the forests, in quest of ivory. The enemy 

 they most dread on these occasions is the gorilla. If they have 

 come unawares too near him with his family, he does not, like the 

 lion, sulkily retreat, but comes rapidly to the attack, swinging 

 down to the lower branches, and clutching at -the nearest foe. The 

 hideous aspect of the animal, with his green eyes flashing with rage, 

 is heightened by the skin over the prominent roof of the orbits being 

 drawn rapidly backward and forward, the hair erected, and causing 

 a horrible and fiendish scowl. If fired at and not mortally hit, the 

 gorilla closes at once upon his assailant and inflicts most dangerous, 

 if not deadly, wounds with his sharp and powerful tusks. The 

 commander of a Bristol trader informed me that he had seen a 

 negro at the Gaboon frightfully mutilated by the bite of the 

 gorilla, from which he had recovered. Another negro exhibited 

 to the same voyager a gun-barrel bent and partly flattened by the 

 bite of a wounded gorilla, in its death-struggle. 



Negroes when stealing through the gloomy shades of the tropical 

 forest become sometimes aware of the proximity of one of these 

 frightfully formidable apes by the sudden disappearance of one of 

 their companions, who is hoisted up into the tree, uttering, perhaps, 

 a short choking cry. In a few minutes he falls to the ground a 

 strangled corpse. The gorilla, watching his opportunity, has let 



