STRENGTH OF THE GORILLA 
Du Chaillu’s thrilling accounts of ferocious fighting with men have been 
completely discredited, and Winwood Reade, who visited the Gaboon 
Valley directly after him, and other well-informed persons, assert that Du 
Chaillu never saw a living gorilla. ‘That a huge arm descends from a 
tree, draws up and chokes the wayfarer, must be false,” declares Lydekker, 
“for intelligent natives have confessed to knowing no instance of the gorilla 
attacking man. . But we must believe that this ape, if provoked or 
wounded, is a terrible foe, capable of ripping a man open with one stroke 
of the paw or of cracking the skull of a hunter as easily as a man cracks a 
nut. There is a tale of a tribe that kept an enormous gorilla as executioner, 
which tore its victim to pieces, until an Englishman, doomed to meet it, 
noticing a large swelling near its ribs, killed it with a heavy blow or two on 
the weak spot.” 
There is little doubt, at any rate, that this is the least intelligent and most 
savage of all the great apes. Only one of the several young ones that have 
been sent to Europe have lived more than eighteen months; and the single 
one brought to the United States (in 1893) survived only five days. Horna- 
day says this is due to the fact that “‘they sulk, often refuse food, will not 
exercise, and die of indigestion.” A second baby, imported in 1905, died 
on the voyage. 
The third of the anthropoid apes is the orang-utan, or “man 
of the woods,’”’ whose home is Borneo and the eastern lowlands 
of Sumatra. In Borneo it inhabits the swampy for oyang- 
ests between the coast and the interior mountains, ™*42- 
to which it retires in the dry season. It is more often seen than 
the others, and has been well studied by Brooke,” Wallace, 
Hornaday,” Beccari,”® and other naturalists in its native woods, 
and when dead by many anatomists. The Dyaks call it ‘‘mias,” 
and distinguish several varieties. 
The orang-utan spends its life more exclusively in the tree 
tops than does either the gorilla or chimpanzee, rarely descend- 
ing to the ground except to get water, and then it moves slowly 
and awkwardly by swinging its body along between its long 
arms used much like a pair of crutches. In the trees, however, 
the orangs travel with the certainty and ease of practiced gym- 
nasts. Too heavy for leaping, they reach out and grasp with 
c 17 
