them in the mornings and evenings. During my subsequent
wanderings in Gorilla land, I often observed tall and mushroom-
shaped trees standing singly, and wearing the semblance of the
umbrella roof. What most puzzles me is, that M. du Chaillu
("Second Expedition," chap, iii.) "had two of the bowers cut down
and sent to the British Museum." He adds, "They are formed at a
height of twenty to thirty feet in the trees, by the animals
bending over and intertwining a number of the weaker boughs, so
as to form bowers, under which they can sit, protected from the
rains by the masses of foliage thus entangled together, some of
the boughs being so bent that they form convenient seats." Surely
M. du Chaillu must have been deceived by some vagary of nature.

The gorilla-hunter's sketch had always reminded me of the Rev.
Mr. Moffat's account of the Hylobian Bakones, the aborigines of
the Matabele country. Mr. Thompson, a missionary to Sherbro ("The
Palm Land," chap. xiii), has, however, these words:--"It is said
of the chimpanzees, that they build a kind of rude house of
sticks in their wild state, and fill it with leaves; and I doubt
it not, for when domesticated they always want some good bed, and
make it up regularly."

Thus I come to the conclusion that the Nchigo Mpolo is a vulgar
nest-building ape. The bushmen and the villagers all assured me
that neither the common chimpanzee, nor the gorilla proper
(Troglodytes gorilla), "make 'im house." On the other hand, Mr.
W. Winwood Reade, writing to "The Athenaeum" from Loanda (Sept. 7,
1862), asserts,--"When the female is pregnant he (the gorilla)
builds a nest (as do also the Kulu-Kamba and the chimpanzee),
where she is delivered, and which is then abandoned." And he thus