oung, and kept four months, and many means were used to tame
it; but it was incorrigible, so that it bit me an hour before it died."

Mr. Ford discredits the house-building and elephant-driving stories, and
says that no well-informed natives believe them. They are tales told to
children.

I might quote other testimony to a similar effect, but, as it appears to
me, less carefully weighed and sifted, from the letters of MM. Franquet
and Gautier Laboullay, appended to the memoir of M. I. G. St. Hilaire,
which I have already cited.

Bearing in mind what is known regarding the Orang and the Gibbon, the
statements of Dr. Savage and Mr. Ford do not appear to me to be justly
open to criticism on 'a priori' grounds. The Gibbons, as we have seen,
readily assume the erect posture, but the Gorilla is far better fitted
by its organization for that attitude than are the Gibbons: if the
laryngeal pouches of the Gibbons, as is very likely, are important
in giving volume to a voice which can be heard for half a league, the
Gorilla, which has similar sacs, more largely developed, and whose
bulk is fivefold that of a Gibbon, may well be audible for twice
that distance. If the Orang fights with its hands, the Gibbons and
Chimpanzees with their teeth, the Gorilla may, probably enough,
do either or both; nor is there anything to be said against either
Chimpanzee or Gorilla building a nest, when it is proved that the
Orang-Utan habitually performs that feat.

With all this evidence, now ten to fifteen years old, before the world
it is not a little surprising that the assertions of a recent traveller,
who, so far as the Gorilla is concerned, really does very little more
than repeat, on his own authority, the statements of Savage and of Ford,
should have met with so much and such bitter opposition. If subtraction
be made of what was known before, the sum and substance of what M. Du
Chaillu has affirmed as a matter of his own observation respecting the
Gorilla, is, that, in advancing to the attack, the great brute beats his
chest with his fists. I confess I see nothing very improbable, or very
much worth disputing about, in this statement.

With respect to the other man-like Apes of Africa, M. Du Chaillu tells
us absolutely nothing, of his own knowledge, regarding the common
Chimpanzee; but he informs us of a bald-headed species or variety, the
'nschiego mbouve', which builds itself a shelter, and of another rare
kind with a comparatively s