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
Hanno saw, captured, and called ‘gorullai’.”

A Gorilla 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