230 ANIMAL BIOLOGY 



of one of their family group. The father and mother of a 

 family appear to remain together permanently. Either 

 sex may carry the young offspring about in the arms much 

 as human beings carry their babies. 



The largest and strongest of the apes is the gorilla, a 

 native of Africa. The gorilla lives in forests, often con- 

 structing a sort of nest in the branches of a tree where it 

 spends the night. Powerful, brutal, ferocious, the gorilla 

 is a formidable foe; but one which rarely if ever attacks 

 man unprovoked. Gorillas have never been kept very 

 long in captivity. They sulk, lose their spirit, and if they 

 do not succumb to tuberculosis, which kills so many of the 

 apes in captivity, they languish and die, apparently 

 through sheer mental depression. 



The older naturalists set man apart in a group by him- 

 self, but as Huxley conclusively showed by a very thorough 

 comparison of the structure of man with that of the apes, 

 man differs less in structure from the higher apes than the 

 latter differ from the lower members of the order of 

 primates. Man differs greatly from the apes in the size 

 of the 'brain, which is a certain though inadequate index 

 of his greatly superior intelligence. There is abundant 

 evidence that the apes are by far the most intelligent of 

 the animals below man; but it is quite certain that the 

 intellect of the lowest savage stands very high above that 

 of his highest simian relative. There are no "connecting 

 links" between man and ape at present living on the earth, 

 but in ancient deposits fossil bones of human beings have 

 been discovered which probably belonged to a type of man 

 more primitive than any existing race. 



Man is regarded as constituting a separate family, the 

 Hominidas, and a single genus, Homo. The various kinds 

 of men, notwithstanding their marked differences, are 

 commonly considered as members of a single species, 



