It seems possible, then, that man may sometimes live with animals, and lead the life that they do—in fact, become an animal to all intents and purposes. On the other hand, there are animals that do not fall so very far behind man, in his lowest and most savage state. I am thinking, of course, of the great man-like or anthropoid apes, in whose uncouth, satyr-like forms, and grotesque physiognomies, we no doubt see, if not actual copies of what our remote ancestors were, yet something very similar to what they must have been. This was Darwin’s opinion, though from the stress that is always being laid upon his not having thought the existing apes our ancestors—as some still think he did—but only our co-descendants from a common progenitor, there is a danger of forgetting that it was. Man, according to Darwin’s view, has very much diverged from this common ape ancestor, whilst the existing apes have not; but he has only so diverged through a number of steps or stages, and could we trace these back, we should soon reach beings—our real forefathers—differing but little from the apes of the present day. This is really not so very different from having descended from those actual apes; but many people seem to find great comfort in thinking they have not done that. It is only tweedledum as against tweedledee, but they make the most of it. [Illustration: MIDNIGHT ASSASSINS. From the picture by Briton Riviere, R.A.] Chief amongst these interesting beings, whose general appearance, in spite of their hairiness, their semi-quadrupedal gait and their arboreal habits, distinguishes them amongst all other animals, as being next-of-kin to man, stands the great gorilla, who lives its life in the half-twilight gloom of the forests of equatorial Africa. What is this life? Unfortunately, the little we know of it is all in connection with the persecution which these creatures, like their relatives the orangs and chimpanzees, are always liable to, and too frequently endure, at the hands of man; so that very little concerning them, beyond how they behave when shot, has as yet been made known to us. The female gorilla, it would seem, makes a shelter of woven branches amongst the trees (as do both the species above mentioned) for herself and her young one; but whether the male, who is less arboreal, does this too, I am not so sure, and indeed Du Chaillu—who, though hardly ever mentioned by writers on natural history who yet follow him, knew more than anyone else about gorillas—does not, as far as I remember, give this as one of their habits. Be this as it may, the gorilla is the least arboreal of all the anthropoid apes, not climbing nearly so well or so frequently, even as the chimpanzee—its companion in the African forests—much less the orang-utan of Borneo and Sumatra, or the gibbon, another Asiatic species, which is the most active of all. Its great bulk would, no doubt, be against this, but as the size of any animal must stand in some sort of