The Haunts of the Gorilla

Abstract

CONCERNING Mr. Du Chaillu's saying (see NATURE, May 1, p. 19) “that, so far as he is aware, no white man has been able since his time to penetrate to the haunts of the gorilla and bring home specimens killed by himself,” I beg to remark that Herr von Koppenfels, in the years 1873–80, killed personally a number of gorillas in the environs of the Ogowé, and sent 3 large specimens, with their skeletons, to the Dresden Museum, some of which I described in the Mittheilungen aus dem königl. zoologischen Museum zu Dresden, vol. ii. 1877, p. 230 seq. The Museum in Stuttgart also contains several specimens killed by that intrepid traveller; and other museums, I believe—American museums, for instance—possess some. (See also his remarks in the American Naturalist, vol. xv. p. 447; and Die Gartenlaube, 1877, p. 416 seq., with plate; as well as mine in Der zoologische Garten, 1881, vol. xxii. p. 231.) Herr von Koppenfels, who died in the year 1884 in Erfurt, in consequence of diseases acquired in the tropical climate, says (l.c.) that the haunts of the gorilla in West Africa are in the forests between the mouths of the Mimi and the Congo Rivers, i.e. between 1° N. lat. and 6° S. lat. How far the region extends into the interior is even yet unknown.