CHAPTER XIV 
IS THE GORILLA ALMOST A MAN? 
HEN Herbert Bradley and I started down 
\ \ from Mt. Mikeno to join the ladies of our 
party at the Mission of the White Friars we 
had the skeletons, skins, and measurements of four 
adult gorillas and the mummified carcass and skin 
of a baby. I had made death masks of them all and 
likewise some plaster casts of their feet and hands. 
I also had 300 or 400 feet of film showing wild gorillas 
in action, and some general observations of the goril- 
la’s habits in the mountains of the Lake Kivu region 
on the eastern border of the Belgian Congo in Central 
Africa. J had the material for which I had come to 
Africa—material sufficient to make a correct group 
of gorillas for the proposed Roosevelt African Hall 
of the Museum of Natural History in New York— 
but I also had a great deal more, a vision of how to 
study this animal which is man’s nearest relative. 
As soon as you have anything to do with the gorilla 
the fascination of studying him begins to grow on 
you and you instinctively begin to speak of the 
gorilla as “he” in a human sense, for he is obviously 
as well as scientifically akin to man. 
I have taken some pains in describing my adven- 
tures with the gorillas of Mikeno to show that they 
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