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 CHAPTER XIV

IS THE GORILLA ALMOST A MAN?

When Herbert Bradley and I started down from Mt. Mikeno to join the ladies of our party at the Mission of the White Friars we had the skeletons, skins, and measurements of four adult gorillas and the mummified carcass and skin of a baby. I had made death masks of them all and likewise some plaster casts of their feet and hands. I also had 300 or 400 feet of film showing wild gorillas in action, and some general observations of the gorilla's habits in the mountains of the Lake Kivu region on the eastern border of the Belgian Congo in Central Africa. I had the material for which I had come to Africa—material sufficient to make a correct group of gorillas for the proposed Roosevelt African Hall of the Museum of Natural History in New York—but I also had a great deal more, a vision of how to study this animal which is man's nearest relative.

As soon as you have anything to do with the gorilla the fascination of studying him begins to grow on you and you instinctively begin to speak of the gorilla as "he" in a human sense, for he is obviously as well as scientifically akin to man.

I have taken some pains in describing my adventures with the gorillas of Mikeno to show that they