The gorillas ought scarcely to be counted
among the amenities of travel, as they do not,
like the flies and ants, intrude upon the haunts
of man. Mr. du Chaillu tells us that the tales
of the gorilla sitting on a tree, shrouded in the
gloom of the forest, and fishing fur the hindermost
negro of a party, hooking him up, and
deliberately throttling him, are all fables, and
that the brute, though deadly in its attack, had
to be hunted out. Of course, if the traveller
goes after the gorilla with the full intention of
killing it, he cannot complain if it kills him
instead.

It must certainly be as nice a party as any
one could wish to meet on a summer-day's stroll.
An African traveller once told us, that
nothing ever made such an impression on him as
the awful silence of one of those deep forests, and
the unearthly effect of the apes and baboons
climbing up and down the trees with such
prodigious rapidity, and without the least noise.
The sight of the gorilla at such moments must
be appalling. The old pictures of the Evil One
are far behind the actual brutishness of this
creature; particularly an old male, which, like
the Australian devil, seems to be always boiling
over with rage.

No proper explanation has been given of its
vast strength. The size of the muscles is
certainly inadequate to account for it. The gorilla
is not nearly so high as man. Mr. du Chaillu
measured his specimens to the tips of the toes.
Except in the vast length of its arms and the
girth of the chest (which the author strongly
suspects was not taken as it should have been
under the armpits), many of our prize-fighters
and wrestlers equal it, or very nearly so.
Among wrestlers and acrobats the length of
the arm bears no proportion to their strength.
Richard Chapman, so long the hero of the
Cumberland wrestling ring, and a man of great
physical strength; James Ward, the champion, and
one of the strongest men in England, who in the
prime of life could pitch a quoit fifty yards, are
both rather short-armed. Yet it is very doubtful
if either of these men could cope with a
moderate sized baboon, an animal not half so
long as a gorilla. Man is, in point of fact, inch
for inch, one of the weakest animals created,
resembling the horse and sheep in this respect.
All sorts of stories have been told of the strength
and swiftness of foot man might and sometimes
does attain to in the wild state; yet no wild
race has been found which even equals the
European in these points. All we can learn
teaches us that man is by nature a weak, slow-
footed animal, a bad climber and swimmer;
that but for his cunning he might starve. An
ape of the same size would easily master a lion,
but then the muscles even of the wild man are
never hard and vitalised like those of the ape:
most probably from such a much larger quantity
of the vitalising power being required for
the more developed brain.

The other great apes appear to have nothing
of the implacable hatred of man shown by the
gorilla. As for the kooloo kamba, he looks
too much astonished at himself and every one
else to think of mischief. The nshiego mbouvé
seems very social. One caught young used to
sit by the fire at night with the men; and the
description of his master watching him, and
wondering what he was thinking of as he sat
gazing so sadly at the fire, is inexpressibly
quaint. Hi turned out very badly, however,
got drunk, and stole, so that we are afraid his
morals were not much higher than those so
prevalent among the other neighbours of the
gorilla.

GHOSTLY QUARTERS.

THE Greeks and Romans had some advantage
over us in their ghost theories. We believe that
man is a compound of matter and spirit only;
they gave to the material part of man three
spirits—the Manes, the Spiritus, and the
Umbra. The manes invariably went down after
death to the infernal regions; the spiritus
ascended to the skies, and became absorbed in the
divinity; the umbra hovered about the tomb,
as if loth to part company with the corpus, or
body. It was the umbra, therefore, which on
all fitting occasions—and sometimes on
occasions not fitting—held intercourse with the
friends or enemies of the deceased.

The ghosts of modem days, if they show
themselves at all, must, by some extraordinary
means, and for some special purpose, escape for
a season from their prison-house. When they
come as mere sounds, be these sounds ever so
extravagant, they are very vulgar ghosts, and
being vulgar, they are almost always hunted
away, not unfrequently by police-officers.
Others, which appeal to the sense of right, are
generally traceable to diseases of the brain, or
to intemperance—especially in the case of
opium—or to some defect in the optic nerve.
The well-known story of Gaffendi and the
demoniac is a case in point. The philosopher,
arriving in a Lombard village, once upon a time,
found a wretched man about to be burnt to
death because of his familiar intercourse with
the devil. The accused not only acknowledged
his offence but deeply deplored it. He was
quite willing to die. But Gaffendi prevailed
upon the magistrates to suspend the execution,
in order that the criminal might introduce him
—as he undertook to do—to his Satanic
Majesty. Such interviews, as a matter of course,
occurred only at night; and the demoniac, a
little before twelve o'clock, swallowed a pill,
gave another to Gaffendi, and besought him to
follow his example. Gaffendi took the pill, and
quietly gave it to his dog. By-and-by the
demoniac fell asleep, and in his sleep writhed and
tossed himself about terribly, and so did the
poor dog. At last the man awoke, and began to
congratulate Gaffendi on having seen the devil.
Nor could he be persuaded to believe that the
whole was a troubled dream, until his attention
was drawn to the dog, who still writhed under
the influence of the opium which Gaffendi had
given it.