BELIEFS OF TEE NATIVES. 
9 
disappearance of one of their companions, who is hoisted up into a tree, uttering, perhaps, only a short 
choking sob. In a few minutes he falls to the ground a strangled corpse, for the animal, watching his 
opportunity, has let down his huge hind-hand and seized the passing negro by the neck with a vice- 
like grip, and has drawn him up into the branches, dropping him when life and struggling have 
ceased. 
The missionaries, when they were established in the Gaboon region, found that all along the coast 
the Gorillas were believed by the natives to be human beings, members of their own race degenerated. 
Some natives who had been a little civilised, and who thought a little more than the rest, did not acknow- 
ledge this relationship, but considered them as embodied spirits, the belief in the transmigration of souls 
FEMALE GORILLA AND YOUNG. (From the Transactions of the Zoological Society of London.) 
being prevalent. They said that the enche-eko, or Chimpanzee, has the spirit of a coastman , being less 
fierce and more intelligent than the enge-ena, or Gorilla, which has that of a bushman. The majority, 
however, fully believed them to be men, and seemed to be unaffected by the arguments offered to 
disprove this fancy; and this was especially true of the tribes in the immediate vicinity of the locality. 
They believed them to be literally wild men of the woods. Nevertheless, they were eaten when they 
could be got, and their flesh, with that of the Chimpanzee and other Monkeys, formed and still forms 
a prominent place in the bill of fare. 
Impressed thus with a belief in their kinship and of their ferocity, it was not surprising 
that live Gorillas coidd not be obtained by European travellers. Even a bold and skilful hunter of 
the elephant, when pressed to bring in one, declared he would not do it for a mountain of gold. 
In 1847 the first sight of a part of a Gorilla was obtained by an American missionary; it was 
a skull, and its shape struck him as being so extraordinary that he believed the natives were correct 
in attributing it to the much-talked-of Ape of whose ferocity and strength he had heard so much. 
