66 MR. G. L. BA'lES OX THE [Fell. 7, 



forest ; yet, except in a few cases where they have been trapped, 

 no white man I know has ever seen one alive. No white man I 

 know ever saw a Buffalo ; but their tracks are often seen, and 

 natives sometimes kill them and sometimes are killed by them. 



The Red River-Hog does great damage to crops, and many of 

 them are killed by the natives with their guns and in pitfalls ; 

 yet I never distinctly saw one running wild, though I have often 

 heard them, and seen places where they had been. 



It is doubtless true that one walking along the paths through 

 the forest is never far- from a company of monkeys feeding in the 

 tree-tops ; but a person who is not thinking of monkeys may some- 

 times go many days' journey without catching a, glimpse of one. 

 ISTo white man I know has ever seen a Gorilla wild, plainly enough 

 to be sure that that was what he saw ; yet in certain localities 

 there ai'e, at times, many of them. I once tramped around with 

 a native guide for several days, seeing recent tracks of Gorillas 

 and beds where they had slept, without once meeting one. 



The natives of the country hunt the animals for food, and have 

 the inherited keenness of sight and hearing of savages, improved 

 by practice, the immense advantages of dark skins, rendering them 

 inconspicuous in the darkness of the forest, and a noiseless step, 

 by which they can approach game without alarming it ; they 

 thus learn far more about the animals of the countiy than any 

 white man learns. I have no doubt that most of the scanty 

 information hitherto published about animal life in the Guinea 

 forest has been obtained from natives. Even Du Chaillu, who 

 gained more knowledge of this forest than any other man, must 

 have based his accounts on information obtained fiom natives. 

 It was the opinion of some of the old missionaries, whose guest he 

 was at times while in Afilca, that many of the adventures he 

 relates were taken from the hunting-tales of natives, and that, 

 although in representing them as his own personal adventures he 

 may have been untruthful, he probably took conscientious care to 

 tell only what he believed really had happened to some one, and 

 hence was not untruthful Avhere the facts of natural histoiy 

 were concerned. 



These remarks about the difficulty of observing animal life here 

 are intended to furnish some excuse for the scantiness of the 

 information in the notes that follow. They are intended also as 

 an apology for recounting things told by natives. Of course not 

 everything told by natives has been accepted as true. A tendency 

 to exaggerate could be detected by comparing different accol^nts ; 

 and sometimes statements in which all accounts agree were found 

 to be the least trustworthy of all, since they v.-ere found to be 

 merely taken from tradition and not from actual observation, like 

 many popular beliefs about animals among white races. But 

 such worthless statements should be sifted out, and the statements 

 here given from native testimony are such as seem worthy of 

 belief. 



Befoi'e coming to notes about particular animals or groups of 



