246 IN BRIGHTEST AFRICA 
months old and in the best of health and weighs nine pounds. 
She has cut six teeth and the only ailment she has had was a 
cold which she evidently caught from me and which she recovered 
from very quickly. She does not show any signs of walking 
yet and up till now I have fed her entirely on cow’s and goat’s 
milk and occasionally, when fresh milk was unobtainable, on 
canned milk. 
P. S. Since writing the above, which has been unavoidably 
delayed in mailing, the young one which I mentioned has died; 
at the time of her death she was just over three months old. 
One of the most interesting facts in this account 
of Foster’s is the fact that the baby gorilla caught 
cold from him. Animals usually do not catch man’s 
diseases. Seemingly the gorilla is near enough man 
to contract at least some of them. Probably he is not 
immunized against any contagious diseases. This 
free-of-disease state, if it exists, will make him a unique 
pathological study. And certainly the gorilla differs 
from other animals in his freedom from parasitical 
disease. I did not have an opportunity to study him 
with a microscope, but he is the only wild animal in 
Africa that I have ever skinned and cut up for scien- 
tific purposes that had no visible signs of parasites on 
him or in him. 
Reichenow also has made some deductions about 
the family life of gorillas in the Mikeno region which 
are interesting. ‘‘The sleeping plans of the members 
of a gorilla company,” he says, “do not lie irregularly 
near each other but we find them joined in groups of 
two, three, or four, which lets us clearly recognize that 
within the herd there exists a division according to 
families. The nests of a family lie close to each other 
