396 Zoological Society : — 



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 he near, and requiring 

 his defence. No negro willingly approaches the tree in which the 

 male Gorilla keeps guard. Even with a gun the experienced 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 attested. 



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, with the hair erected, 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 author 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 proxi- 

 mity of one of these frightfully formidable apes by the sudden dis- 

 appearance of one of their companions, 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 

 the lower branches of the Gorilla's dwelling-tree, he will gain an 

 easier victory ; and the huge canines, with which only the male 

 Gorilla is furnished, doubtless have been assigned to him for defend- 

 ing his mate .and offspring. 



The skeleton of the old male Gorilla obtained for the British 

 Museum in 1857, shows an extensive fracture, badly united, of the 

 left arm-bone, which has been shortened, and gives evidence of long 

 suffering from abscess and partial exfoliation of bone. The upper 

 canines have been wrenched out or shed some time before death, for 

 their sockets have become absorbed. 



The redeeming quality in this fragmentary history of the Gorilla is 

 the male's care of his family, and the female's devotion to her young. 



It is reported that a French natural-history collector, accompanying 

 a party of the Gaboon negroes into the Gorilla woods, surprised a 

 female with two young ones on a large boabdad (Adansonia), which 



