264 IN BRIGHTEST AFRICA 
of little value; for one man’s measurements are not 
often reliable guides for another man to work by. 
In making a group as it really should be done, we 
cannot rely on one man out in the field to shoot and 
another back at the museum to mount. The men 
who study the animal and who shoot him must come 
back and mount him, and the men who make the 
accessories and who paint the background must go 
and make their studies on the spot. When all this 
is done the cost of the skins, instead of being half the 
expense of a group, is not five per cent. 
I shall make the gorilla group, on which I am now 
at work, a real example of the proper method. A go- 
rilla group undertaken three years ago in the average 
museum would have been done in the following man- 
ner. Skins would have been purchased from hunters 
in Africa. The men who were going to mount them 
would have studied the available writings on gorillas. 
They would have found out that the gorilla was a 
ferocious animal who inhabited the dense forests 
and, like as not, that he lived in trees most of the 
time. And that is the kind of animal the group would 
have shown. 
Not satisfied with such a method, I went to Africa 
to get acquainted with the gorilla in his home. I 
found him in a country of marvellous beauty, spending 
much of his time in the open forests or in the sun- 
shine of the hillsides. I found, too, that he was 
neither ferocious nor in the habit of living in trees. 
He can climb a tree just as a man can climb a tree, 
but a group of human beings up a tree would be 
