Miscellaneous. 343 



Mr. J. Beck stated that he did not expect to be referred to on this 

 subject ; but he certainly had looked for the impressions of bullet- 

 marks in the front of the Apes exhibited by M. Du Chaillu, and 

 could not find them. 



Dr. Lankester said he had communicated to M. Du Chaillu the 

 substance of Dr. Gray's letter. That gentleman's reply was, that the 

 charge was an old one ; and that, ks he had answered it so frequently, 

 he did not think it necessary to come and answer it again. 



We copy the following reply to the above letter from the ' Athe- 

 naeum ' of Sept. 21, 1861, Professor Owen having transmitted it to 

 that journal, as it arrived at Manchester after the Section had finished 

 its sittings : — 



Prof. Owen to the President of Section D. 



" Sheffield, Sept. 11, 1861. 

 "Sir, — Having just received the 'Manchester Examiner' of the 

 10th inst., containing the letter from Dr. Gray on the death-wound of 

 the large Gorilla, I lose no time in making that reply which I should 

 have submitted to the Section, had I been present when it was read. 

 To the remark that ' the fracture of the ribs, and the supposed cor- 

 responding rent in the skin, are so utterly unlike the effects of a gun- 

 shot, that no sportsman could possibly so consider them,' I answer, 

 that the hole or rent in question is conspicuous ; and that a gentle- 

 man who combines an acuteness of observation which has placed him 

 high in science, with a well-known reputation as a skilful marksman 

 and deer-stalker — Sir Philip Grey Egerton — concurs with me in the 

 opinion that the bole or rent in question does present the characters 

 of the one by which the ball escapes in an animal so killed. The 

 wound by which the ball penetrates is much smaller ; for the living 

 skin contracts, and the difference of size in the opposite wounds plainly 

 indicates the course of the bullet. As to the ribs, their intervals are 

 wider in the front than at the back of the chest : a ball might enter 

 in front without impinging on the rib or its cartilage ; and it would be 

 between the eighth and ninth cartilage, or below the latter, accord- 

 ing to the state of the breathing of the Gorilla at the time, where the 

 ball entered in its way obliquely upward and to the right, according 

 to my observation of the contracted aperture, distinctly manifested in 

 the skin before it was sent to be stuffed. At the back of the chest, 

 the ribs, where they bend outward and forward, are so close together 

 as almost to overlap : a ball would most probably impinge on the 

 contiguous parts of two ; and a slight glancing movement, common in 

 gunshots, might affect a third contiguous rib. No one can look at 

 the back part of the thorax of the Gorilla without seeing there the 

 conditions under which such fracture as the right ribs exhibit, from 

 within outwards, might take place, as the effect of a gunshot-wound 

 through the chest. As I, and all who have had the pleasure of ac- 

 companying Sir P. Egerton in the deer-forest, must hold him to be a 

 sportsman, the asseveration, therefore, that ' no sportsman could 

 possibly consider the fracture of the ribs, and corresponding rent in 

 the skin, as the effect of gunshot,' must pass into the category of 

 many other assertions aimed at the character and reputation of M. Du 



