months old and in the best of health and weighs nine pounds. She has cut six teeth and the only ailment she has had was a cold which she evidently caught from me and which she recovered from very quickly. She does not show any signs of walking yet and up till now I have fed her entirely on cow's and goat's milk and occasionally, when fresh milk was unobtainable, on canned milk.
P. S. Since writing the above, which has been unavoidably delayed in mailing, the young one which I mentioned has died; at the time of her death she was just over three months old.
One of the most interesting facts in this account
of Foster's is the fact that the baby gorilla caught
cold from him. Animals usually do not catch man's
diseases. Seemingly the gorilla is near enough man
to contract at least some of them. Probably he is not
immunized against any contagious diseases. This
free-of-disease state, if it exists, will make him a unique
pathological study. And certainly the gorilla differs
from other animals in his freedom from parasitical
disease. I did not have an opportunity to study him
with a microscope, but he is the only wild animal in
Africa that I have ever skinned and cut up for scientific
purposes that had no visible signs of parasites on
him or in him.
Reichenow also has made some deductions about the family life of gorillas in the Mikeno region which are interesting. "The sleeping plans of the members of a gorilla company," he says, "do not lie irregularly near each other but we find them joined in groups of two, three, or four, which lets us clearly recognize that within the herd there exists a division according to families. The nests of a family lie close to each other
