1859.] on the Gorilla. 27 



usually armed with a stout stick, which the negroes aver to be the 

 weapon with which he attacks his chief enemy the elephant. Not that 

 the elephant directly or intentionally injures the gorilla, but, deriving its 

 subsistence from the same substances, the ape regards the great probosci- 

 dian as a hostile intruder. When therefore he discerns the elephant 

 pulling down and wrenching off the branches 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 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 counter- 

 poising its forward projection. If the gorilla be surprised and ap- 

 proached while on the ground, he drops his stick, betakes himself to 

 all-fours, applying the^ack 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 make the attack, but reserves his 

 fire 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 told the lecturer 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 com- 

 panions, 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 down his huge 

 hind-hand, seized the passing negro by the neck, with vice-like grip, 

 has drawn him up to higher branches, and dropped him when his 

 struggles had ceased. 



The strength of the gorilla is such as to make him a match for a 

 lion, whose tusks his own almost rival. Over the leopard, invading 



