The Gorilla | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Jan 24, 1884

The Gorilla.

The gorillas are the terror of Africa. In the gorilla country no lion will live. They are man-haters, and kill them for the love of it, leaving the body—never eating it. When they spy a negro, they come down from a tree, hit him on the head with a club, which they wield with their hind claw, or carry him up a tree, there to murder him. Their strength is so great that they will bend the barrel of a rifle. Only one live one was ever brought to England, and that soon died. Several have been shot, but they are tough customers, and the natives dread them more than any animal of the African forests. The gorilla makes a bed like a hammock, and swings in the trees. He is the sworn enemy of the elephant, because each derives subsistence from the same source. When he sees an elephant pulling down and wrenching off the branches of a favorite tree, he steals among the boughs, strikes the sensitive proboscis of the elephant a terrible blow with his club, which drives off the clumsy and startled giant, shrilly trumpeting his pain and rage through the jungles of the forest.