60 Dr. J. E. Gray on the Zoology of 



VIII. — Zoological Notes on perusing M. Du Chaillu's ' Adventures 

 in Equatorial Africa.' By Dr. J. E. Gray, F.R.S., V.P.Z.S. 



[Continued from vol. vii. p. 470.] 



I HAVE been accused of carrying on a personal war — a " Gorilla 

 war," as it is called — against M. Du Chaillu. Nothing can be 

 further from the truth : we have only met twice, and then our 

 interviews were friendly. I have merely taken up the question 

 from its bearing on the science and literature of the country. I have 

 no other purpose than to forewarn. zoologists and geographers that 

 all the natural-history observations, and the whole of the little geo- 

 graphical knowledge M. Du Chaillu's ' Travels ' present, seem to me 

 to rest on a very doubtful basis ; and I feel that I am the more 

 called upon to do this since the few geographers who seem inclined 

 to believe in his travels place their faith, not in his geographical 

 observations, but in what they regard as his zoological discoveries, 

 which I do not think afford the slightest evidence in favour of his 

 ever having been more than a few miles from the coast ; and I find 

 that this is the opinion of several travellers (as Dr. Daniel, Mr. 

 Fraser, and others) who have been in the same locality. They say 

 that he may have made a few excursions up the river in the canoes 

 of the natives, but certainly not to any distance inland. 



I believe, and have thought so from the commencement, that M. 

 Du Chaillu is as much sinned against as sinning ; for I presume that 

 when he lent his name and, perhaps, furnished a few notes to the 

 American pxiblisher, neither he nor the author of the work (for it is 

 generally allowed that M. Du Chaillu did not write it) intended it as 

 more than a cheap popular book of travels, written to meet the 

 taste of the American public ; and hence they paid little attention to 

 the chronology of the pretended journey, or the accuracy of the 

 facts, as all they intended was to get up an amusing work, with 

 sufficient interesting matter to make it sell among a community who 

 are always seeking excitement and telling wonderful tales, and whose 

 newspapers are so full of " sensation paragraphs." It is no fault of 

 M. Du Chaillu that, to meet a supposed want of one or more of our 

 scientific Societies, he was seized upon and put forth as a scientific 

 traveller and zoologist — be it observed, before his book had seen the 

 light, or his collections were unpacked ; or that he, an " unedu- 

 cated" collector of animal skins for sale, and an exhibitor of them in 

 the Broadway, New York, was taken up and admitted as a visitor 

 at one of our scientific and aristocratic clubs, and selected by the ca- 

 pricious world of fashion as the "lion of the season." 



Nor is he answerable for an English publisher thinking that the 

 book would be a good speculation — that he might sell here for a 

 guinea what was intended to be sold in the United States for a much 

 smaller sum. 



The only excuse that can be made for these proceedings is the 

 ignorance and credulity of what have been called the most fastidious 

 and best-educated classes of the public, who rushed in crowds to see 

 his specimens, though badly preserved and as badly exhibited, and 



