The gorilla is something of a paradox in the African scene. One thinks one knows him very well. For a hundred years or more, he has been killed, captured and imprisoned in zoos. His bones have been mounted in natural history museums everywhere, and he has exerted a strong facination upon scientists and romantics alike. He is the stereotyped monster of the horror films and the adventure books, with obvious (although not perhaps strictly scientific) link with our ancestral past.
Yet the fact is that we know very little about gorillas. No really satisfactory photograph has even been taken of one in a wild state, no zoologist, however intrepid, has been able to keep the animal under close and constant observation in the dark jungles in which he lives. Carl Akeley, the American naturalist, has led two expeditions in the nineteen twenties, and now he lies buried among the animals he loved so well. But even he was unable to discover how long the gorillas lives, or how or why it dies, nor was he able to define the exact pattern of family groups, or indicate the final extent of their intelligence. All this and many other things remain almost as much a mystery as they were when French explorer Du Chaileu first described the animal to the civilized world a century ago. The abominalbe snowman who hauts the imagination of climbers in the Himalayas is hardly more elusive.
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