THE GORILLA. 5 



covered with hair on all parts of the body. The interpreters 

 called them gorillas. On pursuing them, we could not suc- 

 ceed in taking a single male, they all escaped with astonishing 

 swiftness, and threw stones at us ; but we took three females, 

 who defended themselves with so much violence, that we 

 were obliged to kill them; but we brought their skins, 

 stuffed with straw, to Carthage." Professor Owen remarks 

 upon this that " though such creatures would suggest to 

 Hanno and his crew no other idea of their nature than 

 that of a kind of human being, yet the climbing faculty, 

 the hairy body, and the skinning of the dead specimens 

 strongly suggest that they were great apes. The fact that 

 apes somewhat resembling the negroes, of human size and 

 with hairy bodies, still exist on the west coast of Africa 

 renders it highly probable that such were the creatures which 

 Haimo saw, captured, and called 'gorullai'." 



A aorilia Hunt. Paul du Chaillu, in his "Stories of the Gorilla 

 Country, " gives a graphic description of his first sight of these 

 "wild men of the woods." He was inspecting the ruins of 

 a native village with a party of Africans, when they discovered 

 footprints which the natives immediately recognised as those 

 of the gorilla. "It was," says he, "the first time I had 

 seen the footprints of these wild men of the woods, and I 

 cannot tell you how I felt. Here was I now, it seemed, on 

 the point of meeting, face to face, that monster, of whose 

 ferocity, strength and cunning, the natives had told me so 

 much, and which no man before had hunted. By the 

 tracks it was easy to know that there must have been 

 several gorillas in company. We prepared at once to follow 

 them. My men were remarkably silent, for they were 

 going on an expedition of more than usual risk; for the 

 male gorilla is literally the king of the forest — the king of the 

 equatorial regions. He and the crested lion of Mount Atlas 

 are the two fiercest and strongest beasts of that continent. 

 The lion of South Africa cannot be compared with either 



Digitized by Microsoft® 



